From the category archives:

The L Magazine

Art Fag City at The L Magazine: Artforum’s New Media Uproar

by Will Brand on September 7, 2012

This week at The L Magazine, I go to bat for Claire Bishop’s much-maligned Artforum essay,”Digital Divide”. Did she forget about the existence of every net artist? Did she not notice she’d written a sentence specifically excluding the art she was looking for? No. You just can’t read good.

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Art Fag City at The L Magazine: With Genitals, Maybe Less is More

by Paddy Johnson on August 29, 2012

“Whatever you think of the art, it has to be applauded for taking risks,” a friend told me recently. “The art in Chelsea is so safe.” He was talking about Freight + Volume’s The Double Dirty Dozen (& Friends) (through Sep 22), a show that explores the quest for freedom of expression by surveying the depiction of erect penises and juicy vaginas in art. More than 50 artists were invited to participate.

I have some reservations about my friend’s assessment of the show. A dick for dick’s sake isn’t ever going to be so risqué that it’s worth lauding. To be safe in contemporary art doesn’t mean keeping your clothes on—it means keeping your message vague.

Sadly, there’s a lot of this kind of confusion in the exhibition.

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This Week’s Art Events at the L Magazine

by Leighann Morris on August 27, 2012

This week, we’ll be thrown into the dark for the Bushwick Blackout, we’ll take a trip to Governors Island, and we’ll have a free artist therapy session.

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Art Fag City at The L Magazine: Staff Shows

by Paddy Johnson on August 16, 2012

When French philosopher Jacques Rancière studied primary source materials from industrial workers in 19th-century France, he found they had surprisingly busy intellectual lives. Despite days spent performing manual labor, many workers had an active desire to participate in politics, culture, and philosophy, writing poetry, newspaper articles, and journals in their free time. One hundred years later, can we still make the same observations about workers?

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Art Fag City at the L Magazine: Gallery Girls is Terrible, and That’s Amazing

by Will Brand on August 10, 2012

After watching the first episode of “Gallery Girls,” I can promise you that Bravo’s kept up its end on vile. You’ll love it.

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Art Fag City at The L Magazine: Work in Progress

by Paddy Johnson on August 1, 2012

Back in March, Facebook launched Timeline, a redesign that allows users to fill in milestones and user histories all the way back to their births. Five months later, nobody I know has done much with the feature, but I have noticed a few art institutions starting to fill out their histories. I figured they already had websites that hosted a lot of the same information, so I spoke to a few staff members about their objectives for Timeline and how it was working out.

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AFC at The L Magazine: Portrait of the Robot as a Young Man

by Will Brand on July 25, 2012

This week at the L Magazine, I review “Ghosts in the Machine,” an exhibition spanning twenty-five years of machine-related art, from outsider art to Op art to sci-fi.

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