- Mysteriously legible graffiti appeared on an abandoned hospital facing a luxury condo tower in Miami Beach yesterday:”YOUR MILLION DOLLAR HOUSES WILL SOON BE UNDERWATER.” Is this in reference to sea level rise or the city’s notorious problems with mortgages? [The Miami Herald]
- We at AFC recently joked that we should start a new category for news stories: “Living in Dystopia.” Well, today we have one that’s so dystopian and paranoia-inducing it’s practically a public mental health threat. Persistent Surveillance Systems is a private company that has secretly been flying aerial cameras over the city of Baltimore to document everyone’s movements and selling their data to the police. It’s like “real-time Google Earth.” How dystopian is this? So dystopian that the first sentence of this factual news article is virtually identical to the first sentence of seminal dystopian novel Neuromancer. Really. [Bloomberg]
- In lighter news, Dominic Wilcox has opened the world’s first art exhibition for dogs. The London gallery has paintings in dogs’ color spectrum, hung at their eye-level and interactive installations. [Bored Panda]
- Noah Charney is concerned about “art in the age of digital reproduction,” chiefly, that 3D-scanned and printed forgeries are reducing our appreciation of original works, or even hand-made copies. [Smithsonian]
- Peter Doig’s bizarre legal troubles seem to have been resolved. The artist was being sued by a former Canadian corrections officer who claimed to own a painting Doig painted as an incarcerated teenager. This, despite the fact that Doig was never in the prison where the plaintiff worked. The whole case is just so weird. [Yahoo]
- The Economist asks “Is Hacktivism Art?” We answer: sometimes? It’s one of those things like farming, where someone can use it as an artistic medium but the vast majority are just doing it because they need to eat. And then for every good piece of activist/hacktivist/farmer art there are 10 just horribly ill-conceived copycats. [The Economist]
- Oh what a tangled web. Yesterday we linked to a report of a court ruling against restitution in the case of Nazi-looted paintings at The Norton Simon Museum. Today we learn that the person trying to reclaim the art is the daughter of a Nazi. [Culture: High & Low]
- Queens City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer is killing it! He’s taken Mayor de Blasio on over his support of an out of scale development in Inwood which would include affordable housing units, but push more residents out of the neighborhood. And now he is blocking a new building development in Sunnyside that promises 100 percent “affordable housing”, but has numerous issues that have kept residents from supporting the development. This includes being out of scale for the neighborhood, being developed by a developer with other projects across the street known for their mismanagement, and not actually being affordable. [NY1]
- We can’t even believe this headline is real: “Mouthwatering Qing Dynasty Sculpture of Braised Pork Belly Leaves Asia for First Time”. [Hyperallergic]
Tagged as:
affordable housing,
baltimore,
De Blasio,
dogs,
Dominic Wilcox,
hacktivism,
Jimmy Van Bramer,
Living in Dystopia,
Miami Beach,
Noah Charney,
Persistent Surveillance Systems,
Peter Doig,
Sunnyside,
The Norton Simon Museum
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