- OMG. Hasbro made a custom “Chewbacca Mom” action figure for the accidental Facebook celebrity. How has her “15 minutes” stretched this long?[TIME]
- Great news on the housing affordability front: the New York senate has passed a bill banning short-term rentals of entire apartments. This means individuals or management companies can’t hoard apartments to sublet via Airbnb. That’s a trend that’s been well-documented as a major drain on affordable housing stock in places such as San Francisco and Barcelona. The downside is, if you live alone, it’s going to be a lot harder to sublet your already exorbitantly expensive place if you leave town for less than a month. Is this going to push the Airbnb hustlers across the Hudson into Jersey City? [The Verge]
- Whoa! Kurt Cobain apparently made a bunch of visual art, and now it’s going on tour. Jeff Jampol runs a company that manages the estates of deceased rockstars, and he’s working with Courtney Love to put the exhibition together. [Vulture]
- Curbed kicked off a comment storm over the weekend by asking readers what they thought the ugliest building in New York is. The takeaway: Curbed readers are not fans of modernism and have clearly not spent much time in Queens. [Curbed]
- Here’s a nice Father’s Day art story: influential photographer William Eggleston and his textile-designer daughter Andra have teamed up to translate his abstract drawings into collaborative fabric prints. [CBS]
- Anyone seeking to re-live the extraordinary excess of Art Basel Miami? We rediscovered this instagram post by AES+F over the weekend and haven’t been able to stop watching it. [@aesplusf]
- I questioned whether Nan Goldin’s “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” really needed to be reviewed when I first saw the headline on artnet. It’s a great piece, but hasn’t everyone who reads that magazine seen that work 100 times over by now? It shows everywhere. But then I read Christian Viveros-Faune review and was reminded why we read reviews in the first place: they add another layer of experience to the work. From the review, “Sitting through Goldin’s 700-image slideshow felt, I realized just days ago, not unlike waking up to news of another mass shooting. Virtually overnight, people whose youth had been electric with possibility were cruelly no longer in the picture. Meantime, their photographic likenesses morphed from simple snapshots into something else: portraits that turned elegiac, hopeful, monumental even.” [artnet News]
- Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin died this weekend in a bizarre car accident. The 27 year-old actor, who played Pavel Chekov in the new “reboot” films, was run over by his own car after he parked on a hill and was standing behind the vehicle. [CNN]
- Dylan Schenker writes about the International Digital Arts Biennial and what happens when the programming and aesthetics of a machine butt up against the will of humans—a theme within the biennial. [Creative Applications]
- Other creative industries are waking up to the crisis the art world has been justifiably freaking out over: gentrification is draining talent from the capitals of the culture sector. This piece does a pretty good job of outlining just how problematic the increase in housing costs can be, through the eyes of fashion designers. [Business of Fashion]