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The AFC Staff

Friday Links: If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late

by The AFC Staff on May 1, 2015

So Drake is curating a show at Sotheby’s, but did you also know he’s curating the show’s soundtrack? Each work gets paired with a song. For instance, a Nick Cave soundsuit with pink flowers gets paired with Kendrick Lamar’s “Fuck Your Ethnicity.” [Buzzfeed]
“Don’t fall victim to the senseless IAE lingo—sign up for BURNAWAY’s Emerging Art Writers Mentorship Program.” [BURNAWAY]
The city council is asking New Yorkers to turn off the lights. Proposed legislation is intended to help curb energy consumption, but will likely result in a very different nighttime view for millions of New Yorkers. One interesting prospect is exemptions for iconic buildings, meaning a government agency could be “curating” what the skyline looks like. [The New York Times]
The Guerrilla Girls talk about the benefits of anonymity, the new Whitney, and how hard it is to find a decent gorilla mask. [The Guardian]
And, in news that should make the Guerilla Girls happy, artnet News reports that many of the strongest exhibitions at Gallery Weekend Berlin are by women artists. Here’s their breakdown of the top ten. [artnet News]
Finally, a birth control advertisement from Amy Schumer that goes beyond “ask your doctor if….” We were literally laughing so hard we cried. Unfortunately, it’s funny because it’s true. [Alswrite’s Tumblr via Carolina A. Miranda]
The new Center for Art on Migration Politics in Copenhagen (CAMP) is dedicated to artwork and discourse surrounding displacement and immigration. Their first exhibition features a refugee-camp-inspired fashion show by the Rwandan artist Dady de Maximo. [The Art Newspaper]
Worth checking out: Newcity’s annual list of up-and-coming artists from the Chicago area. [Newcity]
The new Internet time-waster, and source of new memes, How Old Do I Look? [How Old Do I Look?]
Your dumb friend Garrett knows nothing about Russian models riding bears. [Deadspin]

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Thursday Links: Fingering the Douchebag

by The AFC Staff on April 30, 2015

Submission to Red Bull, Art of Can

Two headlines presented without comment:

Jeffrey Deitch Will Bring Street-Art Show to Coney Island. [The New York Times]
Jeffrey Deitch Has Sunk So Low He’s Curating for Douchebag Property Developers on Coney Island. [artnet News]

Now for the rest of the news.

Let Red Bull be your inspiration. Now through June 15 they are accepting art that uses their can in some way. A panel of judges will select the best pieces for show at Dilworth Park in Center City Philadelphia. First prize winners in each category receive $2,500. [Red Bull]
“Vanity Capital is the social differentiation that one gets by owning enduring luxury objects.” Marion Maneker. [Art Market Monitor]
Own your studio and put it on wheels. [Hyperallergic]
This is a big deal: New York’s city council approved an amendment to the municipal charter to create a comprehensive, citywide cultural plan. The goals of said plan include addressing issues of affordability—in terms of housing and studio spaces for artists living in New York—and increasing the distribution and availability of cultural events and facilities in all parts of the city. [Hyperallergic]
Nik Kosmas of the now defunct artmaking duo AIDS 3D has given up art entirely. Now he’s weightlifting and has a business selling supplement powders. [Spike]
This week in museum PR stunts, the Brooklyn Museum will award Miss Piggy the Sackler Center First Awards. Other awardees have included Julie Taymor and former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. [Associated Press]
Architecture gossip: Word has it that Danish firm BIG is in talks to redesign the final tower at the World Trade Center site. This could oust Norman Foster’s studio—and hopefully infuse a bit of life into the project. It’s hard to imagine a duller design than the current one, which touts a slanted roof as its big selling point. [dezeen via The Wall Street Journal]

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Art F City’s Guide to New Art Galleries in New York

by The AFC Staff on April 29, 2015

Looking for new galleries? Done. We’ve found all of New York’s new galleries that have opened post-Sandy. Since 2013 it’s been hard to keep track of all the openings, so this list will hopefully help us all get out to a few new spaces.

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Wednesday Links: Let’s Buy a Big Head Together

by The AFC Staff on April 28, 2015

Igor Mitoraj's "Eros" (1999) outside the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Photo: Brian Peterson for Vita.mn

Igor Mitoraj, “Eros” (1999) outside the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Photo: Brian Peterson for Vita.mn

Vagina beware! Woman attempts to make a painting with her vagina, but develops a cyst. [The Daily Mail]
Artist Eva Papamargariti conjured up a fantastical music video for the Scottish pop-synth band Django Django; she transformed all the band members into shiny, floating objects. [Pitchfork]
Nice to see Hyperallergic’s Jillian Steinhauer beat out Randy Kennedy at the New York Times for the International Association of Art Critics-USA (AICA-USA) Best Reporting award. Hyperallergic also won best blog. Well deserved all around! [ARTnews]
After a decade in operation, the New York Museum of Biblical Art will close. The museum cited rent as their biggest problem. [artnet News]
Want to avoid paying 20 million dollars in capital-gains taxes when selling an 80-million dollar Warhol? Buy it with a private foundation, so half the price is exempt, then invest the rest in new paintings. [Bloomberg]
Are You Running With me, Jesus?, Malcolm Boyd’s 1966 prayerbook, explained in terms of “queer straight Christianity.” [The New Inquiry]
In an attempt to be everything to everyone, Facebook will soon allow video calls on its messenger app. [Forbes]
Don’t go to Artists Space this week. Due to “emergency construction work,” the gallery, on 38 Greene Street, won’t be open until Saturday. The bookstore and talks space, on 55 Walker Street, will remain open. [Artists Space]
Even pennies will be accepted in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts crowdfunding campaign. The museum hopes to raise $700,000 from public donations in order to pay $1 million for a new sculpture; currently, the big bronze head by Polish-born Igor Mitoraj sits in a plaza outside a museum entrance. [Vita.mn]

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Wednesday Links: Badass Witches

by The AFC Staff on April 22, 2015

An example of chart brut showing a demonic face in the 9/11 towers

The best art critics working today don’t identify as such. They are Internet culture critics and work at places like The Awl, Gawker, Gizmodo, et cetera. In December of 2014, Sam Biddle discussed what he calls “Chart Brut,” the markup documents of conspiracy theorists. These markup docs are all over the web right now. [Gawker]
Have you ever heard of anything more badass than a pair of witchy, gender-bending, surrealist lesbian artists (who lived next to a graveyard!!!) donning disguises to fight the Nazis? Neither have we. Meet Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. And please, someone, make a movie about their lives. [The Daily Beast via Saint Lucy]
James Rojas on the value of including artists in urban planning: “For us, the building blocks of a city comprised more than simply structures, streets, and sidewalks but equally encompassed personal experience, collective memory and narratives. We felt these were the less-tangible, but no-less-integral, elements of a city that transform mere infrastructure into place.” [KCET]
Myopia is on the rise. [The Wall Street Journal]
Donald Judd furniture is ripe for knockoffs. Calvin Klein’s furniture designs have been inspired by Judd. A reflection on what the original and the reproduction means, and to whom. Warning: It’s bit dense. [Triple Canopy]
Democrats in Congress are proposing legislation that would grant artists resale royalties, a policy known as droit de suite. We’ve discussed this before. Twice. Let’s hope this round of legislation is a little more fruitful. New York representative Jerrold Nadler: “At a time when more than 70 other countries properly compensate visual artists for their work, it is time for the United States to do the same.” Coming as a shock to no one, auction houses were pissed about last year’s similar attempt. [The Art Newspaper]
More good news from Washington: the National Endowment for the Arts is seeking an accessibility specialist whose job it would be to “assist with advocacy and technical assistance efforts for making the arts available to individuals with disabilities, older adults, and people living in institutions.” We’re not sure what the job entails, but it’s definitely a worthy endeavor. And the benefits are great. [USA Jobs]
Art collectors Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson have given the Art Institute of Chicago $400 million in art. The Art Institute’s donation comes with a crucial caveat: the museum will display the collection of 42 works for 50 years. That’s rare, for collectors to exert that type of influence. [Chicago Tribune]
Very excited about Net Art Hell, a new podcast launched by writer Gene McHugh. In each episode, he spends several minutes discussing a single work (like Faith Holland’s “Shaving Cream on RedTube”), and McHugh’s slow, monotone voice has the air of performance. [Net Art Hell]
Apparently Apple’s incursion into the Milan design fair to promote their new iWatch has been distasteful all around. Welcome to our new favorite term: iBotch. Also, why is the comments section of Dezeen the crankiest place on the internet outside of Fox News? [Dezeen]
More on Apple Land: we’re living for how much that actual Apple pavilion looks like one of the knockoff Apple Stores that have cropped up all over China in recent years. [The Guardian]

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This Week’s Must-see Art Events: Strange Monuments

by The AFC Staff on April 21, 2015

A laundry list of things happening this week: an outdoor exhibition about nature-kind-of waves goodbye to the ever-receding sublime, a building sorely in need of repair becomes its own cut-up colossus, artworks act like love letters to monuments, and people celebrate places made significant by other people. Last, but certainly not least: Giant. Dollhouse.

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This Week’s Must-See Art Events: So Many Romantic Loners

by The AFC Staff on April 15, 2015

This week, the art world plays punk teen-fantasy dress-up: feminist CD-ROMs, soap-opera karaoke, protest discussions, and DIY costumes. Whee!

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Tuesday Links: Museum Columns Go the Way of Gluten

by The AFC Staff on April 14, 2015

Robot Glockenspiel Performs Popcorn. [YouTube and above]
In contemporary art museums, columns are going the way of gluten. Both the Broad and the Whitney tout their soon-to-come “column-free” exhibition spaces. High-ceilinged, flexible spaces are one way to keep pace with changes in contemporary art practices, but, turns out, adding or adjusting moveable walls as needed is a giant pain in the ass. [The Art Newspaper]
Creative Time’s gesture of solidarity with Cuban artist and sometime political prisoner Tania Bruguera underwhelmed one journalist, who made note of how hashtags supplanted loudspeakers as the choice medium for transgressively involving the public, and how the public art project largely ignored the immediate public.You know that zen koan, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Looks like the answer is yes, if enough people tweet about it. [Hyperallergic]
Wow. Art in General will leave it’s home in Tribeca after 34 years. Their lease is up. [Artnet News]
Google image searches may actually shape the way we perceive the world. Mostly because believing everything you see is the new believing everything you read. [The Atlantic]
According to UC-Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education estimated 25% of all adjunct professors receive some form of public assistance.* [Slate]
*Here’s a video of a bunch of kittens riding a roomba to help you through that last article. [YouTube]
Still no word on who will run the new .art domain, but .sucks up and working as of June 1st. Looks like ICANN, the group that manages domain name systems, figured out there’s a lot of money to be made from Internet trolls; the fact that this domain name event exists suggests they knew it would would be popular. Naturally, there is already controversy: The company that will administer the new domain, a Canadian-based company called Vox Populi, is charging $2,500 for the website names — far more than a typical website registration of $10 to $25. The Intellectual Property Constituency, an advisory group to the global Internet domain regulator, has already complained. Is this just a shakedown to get money from companies and others? After the June 1 deadline, online trolls or “cybersquatters” could buy up the names and then extort even higher prices, according to the group which includes film, software and music industry associations and other trademark organizations. [Yahoo]

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Monday Links: Holo-protests and Power Grandmas

by The AFC Staff on April 13, 2015

Basically the best picture ever taken

An article from The Guardian claims that Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign tried to offset sexist perceptions of the candidate by playing offense when it came to gender. But her 2016 campaign (yep, she’s running) will address it head-on, recasting Clinton as a sage “grandmother-in-chief.” Will adopting a “folksy” persona win over so-called “traditional” voters? Will re-claiming the grandma throw a wrench into inevitable agist and sexist narratives? Given all the ways it could backfire, we really hope that #grandmothersknowbest [The Guardian]
RIP Gunter Grass. [The Guardian]
While Hillary takes back the grandma, feminist cooking magazines like Render reclaim the kitchen. [Flavorwire]
Sometimes, life really does imitate art. When a large truck-mounted construction crane tipped over and crashed into the Dallas Museum of Art last week, confused onlookers mistook it for a new installation. [Laughing Squid via CBS Dallas/Fort Worth]
The tallies are in: Over half of the 2015 Venice Biennale participants are solo male artists. Female solo artists comprise 33-percent and collectives make up 13-percent of the biennale pie. Womp womp. [Art News]
Using holograms to stick to the man is so hot right now. First an Edward Snowdon monument, then a full-on hologram protest in Spain. Futuristic ghost demonstrators marched outside the Spanish Parliament on Friday in response to amendments to the National Security act that make it illegal for Spaniards to publicly protest Congress. [Revolution News]
For New York City couples, the new norm isn’t married, with children. It’s married, with roommates. [New York Times]
That Medieval Reactions twitter is back on our Massive Links radar, only this time it’s because the Huffington Post got a bunch of art historians to explain what’s really going on in those bizarre illustrations. [Huffington Post]
Acclaimed actress and world’s most patronizing white woman Gwyneth Paltrow wants you to know that she’s rising to the #FoodBankNYCChallenge, an ice bucket-style campaign meant to raise awareness about hunger. Accepting the challenge means limiting your meals to the $29-per-week budget of families who rely on the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). The cause is a good one, but remember that time Ms. Paltrow said she’d rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a tin? Time to put up or shut up, Gwyn. [Huffington Post]

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