Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch

Thursday Links: Art Basel and More Art Basel

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on June 19, 2014

the “Battle of Yestermore” by Iona Rozeal Brown at Performa

Chicago’s West Loop art district is getting a new neighbor, “The Real World.” [DNAinfo Chicago]
American Apparel CEO Dov Charney has been fired! The board ousted him, citing “ongoing investigation into misconduct”; the Wall Street Journal cites piddling sales. [Wall Street Journal]
Here’s a listicle we can get behind. Performa founder RoseLee Goldberg chooses her favorite moments with videos. Gone are the days of minimal conceptual performance. [T Magazine]
The World Cup Condom. [Wall Street Journal]
To celebrate the reopening of Fort Tilden on July 29th, MoMA PS1 is giving beachgoers the Rockaway Arts Fest. Expect “arts and crafts, film screenings, kayaking, baseball games, and more.” The “more” part includes a concert by Patti Smith. [Gothamist]
Art Basel opens to the public today. VIPs have already strong noted work, especially at ArtUnlimited. Josh Baer mentions record-setting sales, but what’s selling might be just as worthwhile. He notes “an uptick for ‘mid level’ or “mid career” works at ‘mid level galleries.’” Anyway, we’re still here in New York right now. [The Baer Faxt]
“Art Basel is the only fair where directors, curators and trustees all turn up together, so they can make much quicker decisions,” dealer Thaddaeus Ropac told the Art Newspaper. This is supposed to be some sort of explanation for why there’s more atypical work at the fair this year. What bullshit. If dealers are trying to sell “underknown” works, like the gray painting cited by Gerhard Richter, wouldn’t the more logical explanation be that there’s not a lot of the better known work available? [The Art Newspaper]
If artists need to learn how to operate like start-ups, curator and artist Nicholas O’Brien writes, then they can look to the distribution systems established by indie game development. [SFAQ]
Adam Fitzgerald interviews poet and former Artnews correspondent John Ashbury. Very gossipy and there’s a very funny tidbit about how Ashbury learned French so he could write his diary in the language to keep his mother from reading it. Worried she knew the word “garcon” he also adopted slang “gars”. [Bomb]
Julien Auctions in Los Angeles is holding their second-ever street art auction. The auction lists eight Banksys for sale; no word yet on whether the street artist disapproves of the sale of his works. He usually does. [Broadway World]

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Tuesday Links: Apologies!

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on June 17, 2014

Terry Richardson

“Is Terry Richardson an Artist or a Predator?” NY Mag follows Terry Richardson around and gives a thorough report on his skeezy, idiotic past. It’s a good primer on all the various lawsuits against him. [The Cut]
The Frick is getting supersized; Peter Schjeldahl approves. The position reads as arbitrary. [The New Yorker]
Joe Scanlan is a white male artist who hires black female actors to play his character Donelle Woolford, a hot young artist who gets a leg up in the art world because of her race. Needless to say, when “Donelle Woolford” was asked to participate in the Whitney Biennial, this led to a slew of protests; Yams, a mostly queer black artist/poet/musician collective, even withdrew from the Biennial. Now Ryan Wong claims that he is Joe Scanlan, and the character was created to deflect this kind of rampant deafness. We gather that this is a joke since Scanlan has a faculty bio on Yale’s website, but Wong’s analysis of Scanlan’s “apology” letter sounds familiar. [Hyperallergic]
Speaking of Joe Scanlan, Carolina Miranda’s epic summary is the last word on the Donelle Woolford. Her thorough, even-handed report includes some interesting quotes from Jennifer Kidwell, who plays Woolford, and has otherwise almost been left out of the debate entirely. [LA Times]
MoMA has added a downloadable app to its design collection; Bjork’s 2011 album “Biophilia” which was made available as an app with visualizations too. [Culture: High & Low]
This year alone, Germany doubled government funding for recovering Nazi-looted art to to 4 million Euros. [Deutsche Welle]
Jerry Saltz on zombie abstraction. Meh, we’ve all been talking about how process-based abstraction has taken over the art world for a while. Not too much new here. [Vulture]
Karen Rosenberg is amazed at Kara Walker’s curatorial ability because she likes both music and art. Rosenberg writes: “Who else would think to compare the Notorious B.I.G.’s ‘Ten Crack Commandments’ and F. T. Marinetti’s ‘Manifesto of Futurism,’ as she does in her introduction to ‘Ruffneck Constructivists’?” [New York Times]
The Joan Mitchell Foundation has created a new artists’ retreat in New Orleans! But wait: The facilities still need to be built and will cost approximately $16.5 million. [Nonprofit Quarterly]
Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program is open to non-profits and artists with a strong exhibition record. The spaces are located in DUMBO and are offered at $12 per foot per year, with a three-year lease. That’s well below market. [Two Trees]
Yesterday, Paddy Johnson interviewed the Theo Westenberger Estate, which is giving out tons of money and resources for artists. (Photographers, we’re talking to you.) They’ve just announced the that Gaea Woods is the winner of their 2014 photo contest, which gives out $5,000 in unrestricted funds. [Facebook]

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Bushwick Open Studios: What’s on the Street

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on June 3, 2014

A tour through the Bushwick street fair portion of BOS.

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Monday Links: Gold Poo

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on June 2, 2014

Discovery Times Square’s newest tourist-bait exhibit: Marvel’s Avengers S.T.A.T.I.O.N. [amNewYork]
“Corporate spiritualism” artist Kevin Bewersdorf who once erased all his artwork from the Internet, returns with a new website full of very zen GIFs. [Rhizome]
“Do you think he had any idea how much and how many people loved him?” Artist B. Wurtz remembers Feature Inc.’s Hudson, “an almost impossibly pure form of art dealer.” [Artforum]
New Orleans shutters the last of its public schools, switching over to an independently operated charter school system. [Washington Post]
Um, so there’s a street artist that’s spraypainting dog poop. He goes by the moniker “Gold Poo,” referring to the gold spray paint he uses. [The Brooklyn Paper]
Here’s a solution to inequality: let’s run around the city on a treasure hunt for hidden money! A San Francisco real estate developer felt sorry for profiting off out-of-control rents and has been tweeting clues to envelopes with $100 in them. A copycat has come to New York @HiddenCash_NYC; maps and clues will be posted once a week and we will be following. [SF Gate]
Does The NYPL’s storage plan make sense to anybody? The Library President Anthony Marx says that books will remain in storage because “bringing the stacks up to code” would be much too costly, at $46 million. And yet, the original plan was estimated to run at around $500 million with potential to rise much higher. Nobody suing the Library understood why the stacks needed to be updated in the first place, as they were built with Carnegie Steel and are a cornerstone of the building. Did the Library throw books away? [New York Times]
Adult Magazine’s roundtable discussion on vulgarity features artist Marilyn Minter. [Adult Magazine]
Drew Daniel, an electronic multi-instrumentalist, Matmos member, and avowed metalhead talks about queerness and The Soft Pink Truth in Pitchfork. It’s a very smart interview. [Pitchfork via @heartasarena]
Cute baby puffins are dying! [Mother Jones]
Andrea K. Scott reviews the latest High Line exhibition, Archeo, which, in typical High Line fashion, includes sculpture you’ll have to search for amid the well-manicured green. She mentions that some works resemble plop art—they are “guilty of plopping.” [The New Yorker]
If you’re an artist walking around Paris with a rooster tied to your penis, you will be charged with a crime. [Radio France Internationale]

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AFC’s 2014 Guide to Bushwick Open Studios

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on May 27, 2014

Let’s be honest; if you’ve been going to Bushwick Open Studios for the last couple of years, you’ve probably got some reservations about the event. By day, it’s a zoo of eateries and portable vintage clothing shops smattered with bits of performance art and artists listless in their studios; by night, it’s an enormous frat party. Slowly, but surely, the BOS listing website is starting to resemble the DUMBO Arts Festival open studios; lots of artists, most of them pursuing art as a hobby.

We know, because we’ve spent the last several days combing the website for studios we think worthy of visiting this weekend, so you don’t have to. Below is a list of studios we recommend. And if you want our unsolicited advice: get the job done as quick as you can, lest you get swallowed by a roaming frat party swarm.

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Monday Links: A Dog’s Best Friend Is a Bucket

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on May 19, 2014

Here’s a dog that really likes its bucket. Gotta love the soundtrack.
Miami cannot agree who has control over the Museum of Contemporary Art’s future; is it the city or the trustees? Behind door one, we have Alex Gartenfeld, interim director for Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Behind another, we have Babacar M’Bow, the other interim director, appointed by the mayor. [The New York Times]
A Brooklyn spa is sending out weekly traffic and detour announcements, so that you can make it to the wet lounge on time. It’s actually the best way to know about weekend parades in the city. [Body by Brooklyn]
BIG’s proposal for a flood-proof Lower Manhattan includes a raised West Side Highway and lots of park space. [BIG]
If you left a prosthetic leg on the LIRR, it’s at the lost and found at Penn Station. [The New York Times]
The city, now accepting proposals for public art projects at 46th Street and Queens Boulevard. You’ll get 5k for the project this summer! [Department of Transportation]
A list of 100 influential women in tech. [Business Insider]
Now you won’t be able to invite people to your Gmail calendars from your email. Apparently people didn’t use the function enough, though that’s likely due to the fact that users didn’t know it existed. [Google System]
But hey! At least you can play Rubik’s Cube on Google’s front page today, right? [Google]
David Carr offers some much needed insight into the firing of New York Times editor Jill Abramson, saying that all the talk about pay inequity was a sideshow. The real issue, he speculates, was that the Times had been lagging in digital endeavors, and in response, she tried to bring in a digital expert, Janine Gibson, a senior editor at The Guardian. This proved to be an issue in terms of office management, as Abramson failed to tell Dean Baquet, the paper’s managing editor, that he would now have to share his job with someone else. Baquet was furious and threatened to quit. [The New York Times]
Yet another museum will be rolling out a Frank Gehry expansion; this time it’s the Philadelphia Museum of Art. [Philly.com via @kellycrowsj ]
Is the 9/11 museum gift shop in poor taste? The New York Post seems to think so, but their argument seems to be wrapped up in the idea that museum directors get paid too much money. [The New York Post]
Ben Davis writes about how the Yams decision to pull out of the Whitney Biennial should be a wake-up call for the museum. The biennial, he says, has a race problem. [Artnet]

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We Went to North Carolina: Jennifer Meanley at SECCA and Nancy Rubins at The Weatherspoon

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on May 14, 2014

In which we discuss Jennifer Meanley at SECCA and Nancy Rubins at The Weatherspoon.

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