- Townhouse Gallery, one of the most important venues for contemporary art in Egypt, is reopening with new draconian oversight. The space was inexplicably shuttered by Egypt’s increasingly paranoid censorship authorities in December and had its archives confiscated. This is terrible. [The Guardian]
- Greg Allen discusses David Diao’s paintings of Barnett Newman’s cut up paintings. [greg.org]
- NASA has put out a call for artwork to send to Bennu, an asteroid with a “high probability” of hitting Earth in 2182. Maybe now is the time to bust out your Armageddon or Deep Impact fan art. [Editor’s note: Bruce Willis fan art is not as plentiful as you’d think.] [CNN]
- The Century Association—New York City’s preeminent private club of arts and letters—elected a woman as its president for the first time in its 169 year history. Susan Morrison, who currently works as an editor at the New Yorker will take on the mantle [The New York Times]
- What is going on with Shia LaBeouf’s forays into performance art? His latest piece, with the grimace-inducing title “#ELEVATE, “ involved the actor spending 24 hours in an elevator. If you guessed that was boring, you’d be wrong: LaBeouf ended up punching a fan/fellow aspiring performance artist in the face after being asked “Can you help me with completion of my next piece by punching me in the face?” [Complex]
- The Met Breuer (in the former Whitney building) looks like it’s trying to distinguish itself from the crowded field of contemporary art venues in New York City. Their inaugural exhibitions include a show of unfinished artworks from the Renaissance to the present and a solo retrospective of relatively unknown Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi, who died in 1990. What does “contemporary” even mean anymore? [The Art Newspaper]
- Düsseldorf’s new subway line is a two-mile contiguous art installation featuring digital artwork and immersive environments. Somehow, it cost a fraction of what the Second Avenue Subway did. [The New York Times]
- The city is conducting a public hearing today on bills that will give tenants more protections. Unsurprisingly none of these bills do all that much. “One would establish an affordable housing web portal; one would deny building permits when a residence has a high number of violations; and one would make five or more violations of the same nature over five years sufficient evidence for an “underlying condition” in a building that would allow tenants to apply to correct the condition in housing court.” And then there’s the legislation being introduced by Councilman Brad Lander, which would have the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development issue a “no-harassment” certificate before the buildings department could give its approval for any demolition or material alteration. The objective is to curb landlord harassment, but Frank Ricci of the Rent Stabilization Association thinks it will just slow down the process of renovation. [Capital New York (behind a paywall)]
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barnett newman,
David Diao,
greg allen,
met breuer,
Shia LaBeouf
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