Archive of Paddy Johnson

Paddy Johnson is the founding editor of Art Fag City. In addition to her work on the blog, she has been published in New York Magazine, artreview.com, Art in America, The Daily, Print Magazine, Time Out NY, The Reeler, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, and New York Press, and linked to by publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Boing-Boing, The New York Observer, Gawker, Design Observer, Make Magazine, The Awl, Artinfo, and we-make-money-not-art. Paddy lectures widely about art and the Internet at venues including Yale University, Parsons, Rutgers, South by Southwest, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2008, she became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital Foundation. Paddy is also the art editor at The L Magazine, where she writes a regular column..

Paddy has written 4753 article(s) for AFC.

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Art Fag City

STUFF: Ten Things Walter Robinson Owns and Loves

by Art Fag City on April 23, 2013
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Are you having trouble understanding artists through their art? Understand them through their STUFF instead.

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Morning Links! Money, Money, Money!

by Art Fag City on January 29, 2013

  • Janaina Tschape lost $150k to her assistant, who traveled in luxury and spent money on EZPasses for her family. [NYPost]
  • The Times has a front page feature on how concerns about the Art Market’s lack of regulation is rising. The article is a 101 course on the gallery and auction world, and lists anything from gallery failure to list prices at their door (not a real problem) to third party guarantees (actual problem). Our favorite exchange in the piece occurs over the subject of “Chandelier bidding”, a practice in which auctioneers bring the price of an object up in the absence of bids, by pointing to the ceiling, and grabbing them out of thin air.

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable, given the clientele and players, to have that little bit of theater,” Mr. Aponte, the consumer affairs commissioner, had said in 1986 during an earlier debate.

Mr. Feigen, the art dealer, said in later hearings that he did not find that argument compelling.

“If I want drama, I’ll go to Broadway,” he said, “not to a financial market.” [NYTimes]

  • We read a lot of complaints about Blouin ArtInfo’s Canada’s Top 30 Under 30. Listicles suck and older, under-recognized artists need the attention seemed to the gist of it. As a Canadian, you’ll forgive me for giving this one a pass. As far as I’m concerned there aren’t enough lists like this one!  [Blouin ARTINFO]
  • Catherine Opie discusses her new series of introspective, “formal” portraits on view at Regen Projects and her departure from MOCA. Lots of great stuff in here including this bit of galling info: Opie left MOCA when she learned that a day after she’d donated a portfolio to preserve a person’s job in Education, that person was let go.  [Los Angeles Times]
  • International Art English gets its own feature in the UK. Many Triple Canopy readers may remember the term from last year—David Levine and Alix Rule coined the term in the journal last year after unleashing a computer program that analysed languages on an archive of e-flux press releases. Andy Beckett asks for their reflections on art speak once more for this article. [The Guardian]
  • Frieke Janssens’ eyeroll inducing photographs of smoking youngsters in period costumes have been brought to our attention thanks to AFC’s new intern Christina Capela. We’ve got nothing to say about this work, except to note that  Nir Hod’s paintings depicting the like at Paul Kasmin were marginally better. Mysteriously, they too got a write up from Huffpo. We’re waiting for a third story to appear on the site so we can write up a trend piece. [Huffington Post]
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Art Fag City Seeks Editorial Fellow

by Art Fag City on January 16, 2013
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Art Fag City invites you to apply to its Editorial Fellowship program. What is it? A fancy title for unpaid internship. It’s also…

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Get This Print by William Powhida! #afcwienerfest

by Art Fag City on December 4, 2012
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As our Wienerfest grows near, one lucky baller now has the chance to own this exclusive letterpress print “The 1%” by William Powhida!

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Art Watch: The Chelsea Storm Surge in Twitpics and Instagram

by Art Fag City on October 29, 2012
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We all know that Hurricane Sandy means tropical force winds, flooding, and coastal evacuations. But what does it mean for art?

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Art Fag City at The L Magazine: On the Total Vacuity of Richard Phillips

by Art Fag City on September 26, 2012
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Poor Richard Phillips. When Marcel Duchamp first dragged that toilet into the gallery, no one knew it was art. Now, 100 years later, we don’t recognize Phillips’s photorealist paintings of female celebrities as the avant-garde trailblazers they really are!

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Friday Links! The Barnes Matisse Hanging Outcry Edition!

by Art Fag City on May 18, 2012

  • Roberta Smith likes the New Barnes and believes the collection should be moved around from time to time. “Blasphemy!” say Barnes purists. Tyler Green says over Twitter that the idea that the collection wasn’t important when it was in Lower Merion is dumb. He’s right, of course, but who exactly is he arguing with? Smith never said that. [NYTimes]
  • Christopher Knight doesn’t like the new Barnes, but both he and Roberta believe the Matisse stairwell paintings suffer now that they’re not in a stairwell. AFC’s Will Brand noted this morning in the office that New Yorkers already have a Matisse in a stairwell. Is it really necessary to complain that much? [LATimes]
  • Animal New York relaunched yesterday. Fancy! [Animal]
  • An interview with Lorna Mills on the Triangulation Blog. In answer to the question of whether posting GIFs on Google Plus is promotion, Mills says, “I only think of promotion as posting exhibition info on G+ and Facebook. The rest of the time I’m making GIFs to throw in the G+ streams, so it doesn’t feel like promo, it just feels like participating in a community of GIF makers.” [Triangulation Blog]
  • The New York Public Library prepares for the future in which all library materials become available through digital devices, and decides to rip the heart out of the central research collection. #longreads [N+1]
  • Support El Celso’s La Luz (The Light), an installation project in Peru. He’s got under $1,500 to raise. I pledged yesterday—you can too! [Kickstarter]
  • If you’re swinging by Seven this weekend (it closes Saturday), then you can also catch the tail end of the inaugural group show at the new Williamsburg gallery Reverse Space. The show features work by emerging artists, including AFC friend Armando Veve. [Reverse Space]
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Art Fag City Seeks Summer Interns!

by Art Fag City on May 9, 2012
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Are you a master’s student in art history overwhelmed by the quantity of your own opinions? Perhaps you're journalism student, with burning desire to report on the news. Either way, have we got a job for you!

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