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 1546 article(s) for AFC.
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Paddy Johnson
by Paddy Johnson on June 21, 2017
Art critics don’t have it easy. They work for little pay and often get a lot of flack for issuing their opinions. But disinterested feedback is essential to the health of the industry, so it’s good to see that there are organizations working to help nurture the field with a little cash. To wit, The International Awards for Art Criticism has announced their fourth edition of their annual awards. Three prizes will be awarded—first will receive 10,000 euro for an essay in English or Chinese, and second, their and forth will receive 3,500 euro. The first prize winner will also receive a short paid visit to Shanghai.
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by Paddy Johnson on June 20, 2017
Back in 2016 Transfer Gallery hosted “Nargifsus” an exhibition organized by artist Carla Gannis and Berlin-based curator Tina Sauerländer exploring the selfie GIF. We covered the show at that time, but we’re revisiting it today because artist LOVID never got the attention they deserved. And this GIF where eyeballs move like flies descending on cyclops deserves the spotlight. Why? Because it’s creepy but also does a good job of visually describing the job of the artist: seeing and making.
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by Paddy Johnson on June 20, 2017
Jimi Dams of envoy enterprises has announced the gallery will close its space August 4th after twelve years of operation. The reasons are the same as pretty much any emerging and middle market closure. In the parting words of Dams, “It’s no fun.”
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by Paddy Johnson on June 20, 2017
- Ouch. Jeff Koons has reduced his studio staff by half. The gazing ball paintings aren’t doing very well. (Surprise, surprise. They’re terrible.) [artnet News]
- Wow. Ben Davis really doesn’t like documenta 14. He calls it “deliberately irredeemable”. A fun read. [artnet News]
- Ew. A noose has been found hanging from a lamppost outside the National Gallery of Art. [Hyperallergic]
- Activist group Care2 is calling on Bill de Blasio to make some of the rainbow colored sidewalks honoring the LGBTQ community permanent. That would be so cool! [Curbed]
- I bet Londoners can’t wait for it to rain now. Burkinabe architect Diébédo Francis Kéré has unveiled this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, an blue structure with a latticed canopy that will turn into a waterfall when it rains. It was sunny the day it was unveiled. [Dezeen]
- “This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.” John F. Kennedy once said, referring to the arts. The Kennedy Center will open its expansion in 2018. A great little profile on Kennedy’s relationship to the arts. [The Washington Post]
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by Paddy Johnson on June 19, 2017
I spent seven hours inside the Nashville, Tennessee airport last week before they announced my flight had been cancelled. I was in town to see the latest 21c Hotel and Museum, but assumed I would only be staying there one night. At 11 pm, I returned to the hotel for a second evening in the hopes of getting a wistful 5 hours of sleep before returning to the airport the next morning. It wasn’t the best day.
The lodging I returned to, though, made my crappy travel bearable. 21c Museum Hotel has all the perks of a W Hotel (minus the nightclub vibe) and adds access to a 24 hour contemporary art museum to the mix. The shows change with the regularity of most museums and promise to challenge visitors rather than placate them. There’s art in all the elevators (a Leslie Thornton binocular video fit perfectly in the space), all the lobbies, the conferences rooms, the bar and restaurant, in some of the rooms and will soon always be on the TVs. (21c will be launching their own video art program that will be the default station.) The only place they omit art is the gym.
If there’s a nice place to land for extra night, it’s a museum.
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by Paddy Johnson on June 15, 2017
Back in August of 2016 Popular Mechanics published a History of the GIF type article, “The GIF is Dead. Long Live the GIF“. We’re just finding it now, and like any good GIF connoisseur we’re linking to it here. Looks like GIPHY gets tons of attention in this article, though it does offer a fairly exhaustive look at the GIF’s history as well.
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by Paddy Johnson on June 13, 2017
GIPHY’s “Time Frame” an exhibition of GIFs plus a week of public programming presented by RHIZOME now includes details on the programming—and most notably, the panel discussion about GIFs! “The State of the GIF”, which will take place Saturday at Gallery 151 will attempt to “explore the past, present and future of the GIF”. This is the kind of open ended discussion that normally frightens us, but since the conversation will be moderated by Rhizome Executive Director Zachary Kaplan, I suspect it will be a directed and smart talk. Kaplan has a history of launching smart and engaging lectures. The panel isn’t too bad either! It includes Marisa Olson (artist/curator), Faith Holland (artist), and Molly Soda (artist and nude panda!). Check it out.
Above GIF: Toyota Li, Time Frame artist.
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by Paddy Johnson on June 13, 2017
- Philanthropist and art collector Agnes Gund sold Roy Lichtenstein’s 1962 work Masterpiece for 162 million to billionaire hedge fund manager and art collector Steve Cohen back in January for a reason. She’s funding a new project supports criminal justice reform and seeks to reduce mass incarceration in the United States. 100 million will go directly to artists who work with the incarcerated. In 2013, artist Laurie Jo Reynolds helped close Illinois’s Tamms Correctional Center, a supermax prison through art. We’re now seeing just how much impact that work has had. [The New York Times]
- Thanks to criticism from Eric Trump and Fox News art looses again. Delta Airlines and Bank of America pulled promised funding from their support of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar because the Trump-like potentate is stabbed to death. [Vulture]
- So apparently avocado art is a thing now? [Time]
- A round up of highlights from Basel Unlimited. I dunno – the art doesn’t look so impressive this year. [artnet News]
- Andrew Russeth is at Art Basel too and has his own Unlimited round up. As per usual, he has the strongest eye. [ARTnews]
- New York’s 10 worst landlords targeted by housing advocates. [Curbed]
- An aside – anyone else notice it’s become impossible to navigate all the sponsored content on Curbed? [Curbed]
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by Paddy Johnson on June 12, 2017
These are the same people who complain about the ubiquity of fake news from main stream media.
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by Paddy Johnson on June 9, 2017
As we head into the weekend know this: Anything cold won’t stay that way for long. We’re headed for a head wave. So make sure you have lots of ice. You’re going to need it.
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