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Michael Anthony Farley Corinna Kirsch Rea McNamara
by Michael Anthony Farley Corinna Kirsch Rea McNamara on August 14, 2015
- There’s a secret gallery in Harlem! The not-quite-legal space was “discovered” by Cy Gavin, and if you want to visit, you have to set up a meeting in a McDonald’s around the corner. The Can, as it is known, is presently showing work by ektor garcia and Michael Blake. [ARTnews]
- When visiting the Weather Channel takes too many steps, there’s an even lazier way to check on the weather, the standalone site “Will it rain in …?” only asks for you to type in your city. [Willitrain.in]
- Why are fashion exhibitions at museums more popular than art exhibitions? “The bottom line is that however much we love to look at art, everyone gets dressed in the morning.” [artnet News]
- Bushwick gallery Norte Maar has moved to East New York. Will these pioneers launch a full-on art migration to the more affordable parts of the city? [Bedford and Bowery]
- The Knockdown Center’s latest exhibition is designed to be interacted with—and viewed—via drones. The future is here, and it is fucking weird. [The Wall Street Journal]
- In other news related to viewing artwork through the eyes of technology, here’s yet another article about Instagram’s increasing role in the art world. [The New Yorker]
- The Shaw Festival has a new artistic director: British theatre and opera director Tim Carroll. The Niagara-on-the-Lake theatre festival is the second largest repertory company in North America, but has faced much criticism for its ongoing lack of diverse casting. Best known for his handling of Shakespearean works, Caroll will take over for the 2017 season and be at the helm of a $45 million building project. [The Globe and Mail]
- Clearly, lion cubs give the best hugs ever. [Reddit]
- “Here was something for our kids, all our kids—not just any kids’ show, but the kids’ show, created to give a head start to the kids who needed it the most, advantaged or not, and that was proven to work… And now it was being sold, not just to commercial television, but to hypercommercial television, a gold-plated premium channel that requires either cable or broadband and then a subscription fee on top of that.” No one is happy with Sesame Street’s move to HBO, and with good reason. [Time]
- Berlin is finally getting its much-needed modern art museum. More than filling the need for more institutional exhibition space in the capital, there’s optimism that a new structure can fill in some of the gaps in the Kulturforum. The pretty desolate cultural district was built by West Germany on a site reduced to rubble in World War II to compensate for the loss of the Museumsinsel to the East. [The New York Times]
- Speaking of in-city rivalries, Brooklyn’s booming skyline may soon have its answer to Manhattan’s mega-tower craze. A developer has amassed enough air rights in Downtown Brooklyn to construct a skyscraper on par with the Empire State Building. [Curbed]
- London’s Whitechapel just announced its Music for Museums fall programming, and we’re pretty excited about the line-up: Florian Hecker! Rjoyi Ikeda! Hassan Khan! [Whitechapel Gallery]
- Ethan Chiel talks to Olia Lialina about her ongoing restoration of old Geocities sites. [Fusion]
- For $65, you can see Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band perform at MoMA tonight. It’s one of several art-world activities coming up in the next few days. [Observer]
- Ever wanted to cast your own dildo? A smithing group in Virginia just received a donation of “High quality steel in the form of used casting molds.” It is a giant box of dicks. [Facebook]
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by Michael Anthony Farley Corinna Kirsch Rea McNamara on August 12, 2015
The original music video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s RELAX was banned in 1984 because it was shot in a leather bar featuring gay men and drag queens.Here’s the restored uncensored version.
Posted by Sam Kalidi on Thursday, July 2, 2015
- The original video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” never made it to the air. Why? It’s set in a gay bar populated by leather daddies and drag queens gyrating in a bondage orgy. It’s 1000x better than the version that made it to MTV. This is what a mashup of Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith films would have looked like in the year 1984—an unfortunately bleak time for homophobic censorship. [via @JMGpix]
- The man responsible for controversially putting the Guggenheim on the map is in expansion mode. Thomas Krens, former director of the Guggenheim, is proposing a new 160,000-square-foot museum, the Global Contemporary Collection and Museum, on North Adams’ Harriman-West Airport ground. Krens, who famously came up with the concept of Mass MoCA 30 years ago when he was director of the Williams College Museum of Contemporary Art, has entered lease negotiations with the Airport Commission, and is envisioning a massive for-profit museum with a collection of 400 works. It will cost an estimated ten to fifteen million dollars to build. [Artforum]
- Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe during New York’s “Drop Dead” epochal era, is becoming a Showtime miniseries. Smith is on board as a producer and will co-write the script; no word yet on casting or when it’ll drop. (Don’t worry — we’ll make sure to let you know when there’s a casting call.) [artnet News]
- In today’s weird “we live in the future” news, Björn Borg’s Spring/Summer 2016 collection, which will be unveiled at Stockholm Fashion Week, is inspired by the real-life plan for human colonization of Mars. [Mars One]
- Why is Apple hiring so many fashion execs? While it seems as if it’s an attempt to push wearable tech, it’s more likely the post-Steve Jobs recasting of the company as a “lifestyle experience brand.” [The Business of Fashion]
- “Rosé and Beyoncé: two pillars of modern womanhood that we could pack into a time capsule for future generations to unwrap, alongside an iPhone, maybe.” A so-called critical case history of the rosé, and how it transcended its basic roots to become the blushing wine of choice. [Vanity Fair]
- Were you a teen on the Internet? Do you have some stuff online that you kinda-sorta want to delete, but just can’t? That’s where “Delete Your Account! Live” comes in—submit your past self to an open call devoted to performances, readings, and any or all media. Hurry, because the event takes place on August 26. [Delete Your Account Live via @willak]
- Questionable quote of the morning: “If you go to Germany, every mechanic will have an opinion on contemporary art, whereas here people are afraid of looking uninformed, so they refrain from expressing their opinions.” Berliners, got some opinions on this? [Domain]
- It’s that time again, when all your Twitter friends be like vote for me—it’s SXSW PanelPicker voting season. [SXSW]
- Want to see that Perseid meteor shower tonight? Your viewing station will suck, according to this article, unless you’re in the countryside. Good luck, New York! [Business Insider]
- The bust of Edward Snowden that was illegally installed and subsequently removed from a Brooklyn memorial earlier this year is on display at Little Italy’s LoMan Art Festival. [RT]
- “Things That Anarchists Say to Me in Private But Never Repeat Publicly” is an anonymously submitted look at how leftist organizing becomes dysfunctional due to infighting and a set of impossible expectations for activists. Let’s just say that the author made a good call by choosing to remain anonymous—the think-pieces about privilege this could inspire would probably result in total ostracization from the cool kids. [Infoshop News]
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by Michael Anthony Farley Corinna Kirsch Rea McNamara on August 11, 2015
Image Credit: thenextweb.com
- How to be a DIY cyborg, from 2013. [Slate]
- Gagosian Gallery is now representing the estate of Nam June Paik. The representation was initiated by its Hong Kong gallery staff, and will coincide with a fall exhibition there focusing on his later works. The move is obviously a huge blow to James Cohan Gallery, who originally represented the video art pioneer. [Art Newspaper]
- On the Alphabetization of Google from a venture capitalist: “The way I see it, Google is the cash cow that finances all the big bets Larry and Sergey are making inside Alphabet…For $445bn, you get $70bn of cash, Google, which does $70bn of revenue and produces $20bn of operating cash flow (probably more now that is it not going to burdened by all of these other investments), and all of these big bets, including Google Ventures and Google Capital, which are about the biggest investors in the VC sector right now.” [AVC]
- A newly-released security camera tape might hold clues to the case of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, the largest art theft in American history. In 1990, a security guard let men dressed as police officers into the museum, who then bound him and his colleague in duct tape and made off with $500 million in paintings by the likes of Vermeer and Rembrandt. Sadly, many of artworks were cut from their frames during the heist—damaging them irreparably. [Live Science]
- How on earth can you publish a discussion on why typing “haha” is for the olds and “hehehe” and “heh” are for the youngs, and without mention of the biggest “heh”-types of all, Beavis and Butthead? [The New Yorker]
- For those rueful about start-up culture’s legacy of inflated fake job-titles, this etymological history of the term “rock star” reveals how the downward spiral began with boomer rock stars becoming corporate shills on the 1980s comeback concert circuit and then ended with the 28K-earning social-media rock star. [New York Times Magazine]
- Amy Goodman interviewed Anne Pasternak and Nato Thompson, chief curator of Creative Time, about the organization’s democracy-centric summit at the Venice Biennale. [Democracy Now!]
- There’s been a surge of censorship in the UK. Art exhibitions and theatrical productions that could strain ethnic tensions have been repeatedly cancelled or relocated due to police concerns that they could incite violence. [The Guardian]
- Kanye West’s new adidas sneaker won’t be released until August 22, but here’s a list of all the shops in the entire human world that carry it. It also looks like a goth grandma knitted a shoe off a plumbing pipe. [HUH.]
- New trend on YouTube: creating frames for the TV show you uploaded. Here’s Garfield and Friends, as seen within a Garfield-theme frame. [YouTube]
- Venice Biennale 2015 Artist Trading Cards. Collect them all! [Biennial Project]
- Melissa Chiu, the director of the Smithsonian’s Hirschhorn Museum, has come under fire for igniting a seemingly one-sided N.Y./D.C. rivalry. Offenses include appointing New York-based Gianni Jetzer as the museum’s curator at large and throwing the museum’s 40th anniversary party in Manhattan, instead of the District. [Washington City Paper]
- Still need a vacay, people with money to spare? New York nonprofit Art in General is accepting slots for a $2,500 tour of Detroit in October. Price includes hotel, meals, but no airfare. [Art in General]
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