Archive of Reid Singer

Reid Singer is now an Editorial Assistant at ArtINFO. A talented writer and baal koreh, Reid interned at AFC during the summer and fall of 2011, after receiving his BA in Art History from the University of Chicago.

Reid has written 39 article(s) for AFC.

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Reid Singer

Lists About Art Taste Like Gummy Bears and Cure the Blues

by Reid Singer on November 4, 2011
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The only offensive thing about Halle’s list is that it might give people the impression that they’ve actually learned something. I really hope commenters were being ironic when they applauded the “art history” lesson available from the slideshow captions; apparently some people can’t imagine how real art history might differ from a brief paragraph with some fun facts. This list is too brief, too arbitrary, and too thin to gather anyone’s attention for more than a few minutes. It is a tremendous success.

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An Interview with David Shrigley: What The Hell Are You Doing?

by Reid Singer on October 21, 2011
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You’re probably a fan of David Shrigley and you don’t even know it. Acting in the fields of graphic art, studio art, books, music and animation, Shrigley has earned renown for making high-brow works on paper with a disturbing, punkish bite since the early 1990s. Though trained formally at the Glasgow School of Art, his drawings maintain an unskilled look, belied only by their being witty as hell. In late September, I met with Shrigley to talk about his career and the compilation What The Hell Are You Doing?: The Essential David Shrigley, which was published earlier this year and is now available in the US.

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Shut It Down: A Reality Check for the Warhol Market

by Reid Singer on October 20, 2011
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In a rather showy restructuring of priorities, the Andy Warhol Foundation has announced that they will dissolve their authentication board. The task of deciding the provenance of hundreds of purported works by Warhol that the Foundation can’t get to between now and the end of the year will thus be left to other scholars and independent experts. “We’d rather our money go to artists, not lawyers,” said chairman Michael Straus, who said the foundation couldn’t go on indefinitely fielding lawsuits filed by people who found the board’s conclusions unfair (or just unsatisfying). They’d rather focus their energies on grant-making and other activities with a broad public interest.

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Friday Links

by Reid Singer on October 14, 2011

  • Didn’t recognize an overbearingly handsome Republican presidential candidate in the above photo? Look again. [Young Manhattanite]
  • Still under close watch by the Chinese government since his release in June, Ai Weiwei has nevertheless managed to co-produce a photo shoot for W Magazine at Rikers Island, Skyping notes as he watched from his laptop. [NYT]
  • An eminently recognizable portrait of Charlie Lumley, neighbor and friend of Lucian Freud, sold for £3 million at Sotheby’s yesterday, several clicks shy of the £4 million pre-auction estimate. [The Independent]
  • Did Van Gogh really kill himself? Biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have their doubts. More on the story from Morley Safer on “60 Minutes” this Sunday. [Culture Monster]
  • “The G-strings have to stay on until daylight goes out,” said the lawyer of Andy Golub, who was granted permission by a Manhattan criminal court to body paint nude models in Times Square — but only after dusk. [Reuters]
  • A painting by Jules Breton stolen during World War I from a museum Douai, France, has been returned to French authorities. Entitled “Une Fille de Pecheur” (A Fisherman’s Daughter), the painting had been missing since 1918. It was accompanied by a pair of keys and several unmatched socks. “Thanks. We’d been looking for those,” a spokesman from French customs said Thursday. [Art Daily]
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Arbitrary Arbitration in Art Review’s Power 100

by Reid Singer on October 13, 2011
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It’s very hard to comment on a list ranking anything — beer, Star Wars movies, or art world figures — without negotiating some serious sass fallout. When reading comments to the 2011 Power 100, published today by Art Review, I thought of tuning my ear by spending a few minutes listening to the trash talk that follows a competition on Drag Race. What would people have to say if Dasha Zhukova gave RuPaul a “bad girl” makeover? Or if Takashi Murakami could talk about how funky his chicken is? And who wouldn’t want to see Damien Hirst lip-sync to the Stacy Q song “Two of Hearts?”

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Friday Links!

by Reid Singer on October 7, 2011

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Massive Links! False Identities | Hidden Paintings | Enormous Hunks of Rock and the Men that Move Them

by Reid Singer on September 23, 2011
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A completion date for the Sagrada Familia, restaurants in the Upper East Side that don’t suck, a moveable Michael Heizer sculpture, and other things you didn’t think you’d hear about when you got out of bed this morning.

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If Harvey Danger Painted: Debating the Merits of the One-Work Show

by Reid Singer on September 16, 2011
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There’s something rather extraordinary about the amount of money MoMA will have spent on de Kooning: a Retrospective, which opens to the general public the day after tomorrow. Taking into account the money spent on borrowing, transporting, and insuring the paintings in the show (which experts value at more than $4 billion), it stands among the most expensive in the museum’s history. Happy as I am to see a show like this go up (and I really am), didn’t MoMA just put on an exhibition with many of de Kooning’s paintings? Some of us are wondering if this is really where our membership dues are going.

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Massive Links! Censorship Showdown | NEA Throw-Down | DC Has a Warhol Ho-down

by Reid Singer on September 15, 2011
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The National Endowment for the Arts launches an ambitious new initiative. The Met raked it in for New York this summer. A beneficiary of copyright laws applauds efforts to undermine them. Andy Warhol’s eminent star quality remains high, unexplained.

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