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Whitney Kimball and Andrew Wagner
by Whitney Kimball and Andrew Wagner on July 29, 2014
Orchard Street is sinking. Image courtesy of Bowery Boogie.
- The sidewalk’s been sinking on Orchard Street for months. There’s been an orange cone in that hole for a while now. Somebody should prolly fix it. [Bowery Boogie]
- Dollar Tree is merging with Family Dollar, but, according to Reuters, super-cheap stores are stagnating. In news that should come as no surprise to the art world, the high-end market thrives. [New York Magazine]
- Last week, Spain’s Museo del Prado announced they were missing over 800 artworks in its collection. Now, it’s just been reported that they discovered one million euros in a previously unknown Swiss Bank Account. [artnet news]
- What’s everybody’s fucking grudge against the subway performers? The NYPD has made the “showtime” kids a “top priority,” quadrupling arrests since last year. The Times links the trend to the return of police chief William Bratton, whose solution for an orderly city was arresting the “squeegee men” back in Giuliani’s day. [New York Times]
- Peter Schjeldahl reviews the new Christopher Williams exhibition at MoMA. In it, he claims that Williams isn’t so different from Jeff Koons. As ridiculous a comparison as that sounds, Schjeldahl makes a pretty good case for it. [The New Yorker]
- We missed this when it came out, but Stephen Colbert interviews Silicon Valley billionaire Tim Draper, who wants to split California into six states, making “Silicon Valley” the wealthiest state in the country and its next door neighbor “Central California” the poorest in the country. This is actually going to be a proposition on the ballot in 2016. “Do all these problems go away when they’re divvied up into six states?” Colbert asks. Lots of polite smiles. Colbert asks if Draper plans to be a senator or a governor of one of these new states, but that’ll be left “up to Californians”. [Colbert Report]
- Avant-garde filmmaking legend Jonas Mekas does a questionnaire with Dazed and Confused. It’s alternately insightful and silly. A choice quote: “What three words define the States today? Jonas Mekas: Dazed And Confused.” [Dazed & Confused]
- We always wondered who bought Tracey Emin’s “My Bed”, and now we know: Count Christian Duerckheim. “I always admired the honesty of Tracey, but I bought My Bed because it is a metaphor for life, where troubles begin and logics die,” he has said. Now he’s lending it to the Tate for long-term installation. [The Art Newspaper]
- “Activism mainly means organizing a community, and this community organizing can come from the art world.” That’s Tommaso Speretta talks about his upcoming book on AIDS activism, REBELS REBEL: AIDS, Art and Activism in New York, 1979-1989, which looks like a must-read for people who are struggling to connect art and activism. He also says museums are slowly adding artifacts from groups like Gran Fury to their collections, but would like to see this happen more. [032c]
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Paddy Johnson, Editorial Director