This is what toplessness looks like in Times Square
- Michael Kimmelman, killing it, as per usual. In his latest piece he takes Mayor Bill de Blasio to task for entertaining the idea of ripping up the pedestrian plaza’s in Times Square as a means of curbing topless women wearing body paint from asking for tips. He calls the whole idea harebrained. From the piece: “As an exasperated Tim Tompkins, the president of the Times Square Alliance, put it on Thursday: “Sure, let’s tear up Broadway — we can’t govern, manage or police our public spaces. That’s not a solution,” he added. “It’s a surrender.” Not for the first time, Mr. de Blasio is creating a peevish impression that, even now, he is running against his predecessor when he needs to be running the city.” [The New York Times]
- The Awl has assembled a post of architectural renderings that demonstrate “That Brooklyn Look”. Get ready for fields of grey, glass and brick combined to create a whole lot of ugly. [The Awl]
- Speaking of real estate, The Awl has another feature on a Bushwick development project called “Colony 1209”. Turns out this was a bad name for building because to “colonize a place means to overtake it, to pillage its resources, to dehumanize its people, and to attempt to erase its past.” Anyway, the owners have changed the name and are happy to talk about the lofts they have for rent, but strangely refuse to talk about turn in marketing strategy. Sarah Quinter, an artist and activist born and raised in New York City, who co-founded Reclaim Bushwick had this to say, “We never just wanted the name change. When you are gentrifying this neighborhood, you are taking away other people’s ability to live here, and to feel like they belong here. So, you should give something back to the community.” She continued, “The name change is a kind of flip way for them to deflect some of the attention, so they don’t have to give up real concessions.” [The Awl]
- Why do plagiarism stories make everyone look like an asshole? Here’s the latest: Kelly Mark recently discovered that her text neon piece “I Called Shotgun Infinity When I Was Twelve” was copied and on display at Old School, a restaurant in Toronto. Neon text based art is the easiest thing in the world to copy. Mark enlists her lawyers. Old School Co-Owner Brad Moore claims that because they were made from scratch they couldn’t possibly be plagiarized. Riiiight. And Mark says she thinks they should commission her to do a new piece called “Old Schooled”. Everyone is terrible. [The Toronto Star]
- Performance artist Tania Bruguera is back in the US. She was detained for eight months in Cuba for her art and activism. [Culture: High & Low]
- There are no instruments used in this rendition of Hotel California, where even the guitars are imitated through vocals. Watching this, you can kind of imagine how this got conceived and it begins with a bunch of bored Dads in a garage one day. Anyway, it’s worth a watch: very entertaining. [Youtube]
- MetaModern at Denny Gallery gets a review from Thomas Micchelli. Micchelli seems to like the work in this group show because a lot of it exists in an inbetween state, but there’s a lot of parsing of what Meta-Modernism is before we get to that. And good luck nailing that definition down. According to the cited cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker it “oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.” Micchelli boils all this down to mean “art after the death of art.” [Hyperallergic]
Comments on this entry are closed.