From the category archives:

Opinion

FOX News Attempted to Troll Me at ABMB

by Michael Anthony Farley on December 11, 2015
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Last week, FOX News personality Jesse Watters visited Art Basel Miami Beach to troll the art world. The segment aired last night, after heavy redaction and blooper clips being used as filler. This is how I remember our conversation transpiring.

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Rijksmuseum takes White-Out to Art History

by Rea McNamara on December 10, 2015
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Has the trigger warning phenomenon hit institutional curation?

The New York Times reported today on an ongoing project at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum to have their history department curators remove “racially-charged terms” from the titles and even descriptions of artworks in their collection’s online catalog.

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Racist Quebec Film Draws Ire from Everyone

by Rea McNamara on November 27, 2015
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White guys are at it again. Earlier this week, Quebec filmmaker Dominic Gagnon’s of the North enraged Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq as a “painful and racist” experimental documentary that used her music without permission. Tagaq took to Twitter to complain about the Montreal International Documentary Film Festival’s (RIDM) recent screening of the film.

And she’s not wrong to be upset. A bit of background: of the North compiles user-generated YouTube footage from Nunavut and Northern Quebec; it’s a mash-up of Arctic tundra landscapes populated with oil rigs, hunting, and skidoos but also Inuit men vomiting after drinking binges, and even a desperate Buñuel-esque edit of a vagina that cuts into a video of a dog’s tail hair being trimmed.

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Will Electronic Superhighway Accurately Historicize New Media and Internet Art?

by Rea McNamara on November 13, 2015
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How has technology impacted art? Whitechapel Gallery will be addressing this question in a landmark exhibition launching in January 2016. Entitled Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966), the show will bring together over 100 multimedia artworks from the past 50 years. Over 70 artists will be involved, including Nam June Paik, Cory Arcangel, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Hito Steyerl, Jeremy Bailey, Amalia Ulman, Douglas Coupland and Judith Barry.

The show is clearly a major coup for its curator, Omar Kholeif, whose rise in the artworld has garnered comparisons with Hans Ulrich Obrist. It’s an ambitious survey that is much needed in a genre still struggling for institutional validation. So, it’s concerning that a majority of the internet art represented in the show will come via the archives of new media non-profit, Rhizome. While Rhizome has substantially impacted collecting and preserving digital art works, they still only represent the perspective of one organization.

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The Enduring Stink of Lucien Smith’s Out of Touch Art Rave

by Rea McNamara on November 3, 2015
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Jeanne Greenberg-Rohatyn is on clean-up duty. Since last Monday’s deluge of overwhelming negative press over artist Lucien Smith’s “Macabre Suite”, the art dealer has faced fire for co-hosting Smith’s “curated” event in celebration of two new luxury condo towers breaking ground along the South Bronx waterfront. (Conveniently enough, Greenberg-Rohatyn is rumored to be starting another gallery in the Bronx.)

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FAIR AND BALANCED: Paddy & Michael Look at BIG’s New Plans for a Fox WTC Tower

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on June 9, 2015
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Bjarke Ingles Group has just unveiled plans for WTC Tower 2, a huge departure from the slightly yawn-inducing Norman Foster proposal. Since this thing is going to forever change the Manhattan skyline, we’re weighing in on the new design, which will be the new home of Fox News, among other tenants.

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Too Little Too Late: The Art World’s Letter-Writing Campaign to the UAE

by Michael Anthony Farley on June 3, 2015
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This week, cultural leaders signed a letter protesting the United Arab Emirates’ decision to bar labor activists from entering the country. That’s great, but why are cultural institutions opening satellite campuses in a right-wing authoritarian state in the first place?

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Islamic State and the Reinvention of Iconoclasm

by Corinna Kirsch on June 1, 2015
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Art gives power to the already-powerful. But when the powerful are dethroned, their art usually comes tumbling down with them. That’s political iconoclasm: the destruction of statues, monuments, and images by those newly in power. Out with the old, in with the new.

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Seriously, Fuck You, Georg Baselitz

by Paddy Johnson on May 21, 2015
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Can collectors all just agree never to buy a Georg Baselitz painting again?

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The Dot Meme Mutates at Zwirner

by Paddy Johnson on May 11, 2015
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Be afraid.

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