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Ann Hirsch

Tuesday Links: Cops are Making Net Art

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on June 16, 2015

Critic Rebekah Kirkman considers images from the Baltimore Police Department’s social media accounts. The often-poorly-photoshopped images are an attempt at improving the embattled department’s awful public image. But the result is so kitschy they have accidentally been making net art all along. [City Paper]

Fairphone—the Amsterdam-based social enterprise founded to create sweatshop-free, less environmentally destructive smartphones using transparently-traded minerals—has unveiled designs for their highly-anticipated latest model. The smartphone will have a built-in case, a crack-resistant screen, open source software, and can easily be taken apart for DIY repairs using replaceable, upgradeable parts. This is huge news for the electronics industry; the group of activists-cum-phonemakers is proving they can get everything right that Apple gets wrong for less than the price of a new iPhone. [Fairphone]

Yesterday, we posted a Rachel Dolezal painting that’s an uncredited copy of J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship. Today, it seems Dolezal isn’t the only person with a secret. Art investor Jonathan Weal is accused of hiding a “long lost” Turner valued at £20 million. Maybe it’s just a Dolezal reproduction? [The Telegraph]

A giant Jesus statue made out of trash has been destroyed by Russian authorities at the request of the Russian Orthodox Church. The artwork by Maria Shinkevich and Alyona Pozhilenko is the latest casualty of the church’s culture wars. Past censored artworks have included everything from a production of the opera Tannhauser to a 3D light installation inspired by “The Eye of Sauron” from The Lord of the Rings. [Christian Post]

An entire article of inane quotes from gallerists at Art Basel about the “experience economy”. This means art hammocks and art tea for rich people. [The Art Newspaper]

Michelle Grabner will curate the Portland Biennial. [Artforum]

Why is the German art market lagging while the US, UK, and China are experiencing booms? Taxation and stricter laws governing the export of irreplaceable cultural commodities might be to blame. [artnet News]

Blaze Starr, the stripper who became a cultural icon in the 1950s and was once the First Lady of Louisiana, has died at age 83. This is a really great look back at her unconventional life, which served as an inspiration to John Waters and Divine. [The Baltimore Sun]

Liberate Tate, a 25 hour unsanctioned performance held inside the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall Sunday protests the museum’s sponsorship deal with BP, one of the world’s largest oil companies. Tate staff have formally voted to end the sponsorship. According to the Tate’s own reports, the BP sponsorship is pretty small—0.3 percent of their operating budget. Perhaps they can ditch it. [Hyperallergic]

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Wednesday Links: RIP, Bo Dollis

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on January 21, 2015

Bo Dollis (left) (Image via Nola.com and Erika Goldring)

Sad news: Theodore Emile “Bo” Dollis, the longtime Big Chief of the Wild Magnolias Mardi Gras Indians, died at his home in New Orleans on Tuesday (January 20th). He was 71. [NOLA]
Happy birthday, Jeff Koons. [Wikipedia]
Chris Ofili at The New Museum finally makes Contemporary Art Daily. He’s a great painter, but geez, those sculptures are cheeeeeeze ball. [Contemporary Art Daily]
Skate’s has released its 2014 art fair report. In it, the report finds that art fair attendance has dropped significantly for the first year since Skate began tracking art fair attendance in 2007. In total, attendance dropped by 7.4 percent since 2013. If you want to read the full report it will cost $500, but the executive summary has a few surprises. Art Miami is the second most attended art fair in the world. [Skate’s]
Continuing with the subject of money matters, 2014 was a record year for the major auction houses (of course!). Both auction houses saw sales plummet in Asia; it’s not a completely rosy situation. [The Art Newspaper]
We first linked to this yesterday, but it’s now become an ongoing story: London’s National Gallery could be facing extended worker strikes after the institution announced it will be privatizing some of its services. The front of house team, for example, would be outsourced. Naturally, the union that represents the museum opposes this. [artnet News]
A woman in Etobicoke writes about the prejudice she encountered when she ran against former Toronto Mayor and crack addict Rob Ford. [Toronto Life]
The painter Luc Tuymans has been convicted of plagiarism over a portrait of the Belgian politician Jean-Marie Dedecker. [Hyperallergic]
The State of the Union address transcript. [The Medium]
After watching the State of the Union, I can’t recommend wholeheartedly enough Guantanamo Diary, written by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian detainee who has been held by the United States since 2002. His writing can be surprisingly fresh, and unexpected; he often makes metaphors including to celebrities like Charlie Sheen and O.J. Simpson. Guantanamo Diary was released yesterday, possibly in conjunction with the SotU address, whereby President Obama stated once again that the detention center would be taken down. [Amazon]
Writer and art historian Anna Dezeuze weighs in on our Gramsci Monument reporting from last year. Dezeuze, who wrote the book about Hirschhorn’s Deleuze Monument, thinks that the monument can be approached with a mix of enthusiasm and criticality; til now, audiences have largely been picking sides. [A Blade of Grass]
The long and cosmic story behind Rachel Mason’s opera “The Lives of Hamilton Fish” about two men named Hamilton Fish who died one day apart in 1936. One was a notorious serial killer and the other one was a famed statesman. We’ll have more on this story. [The New York Times]

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Thursday Links: MoMA Garden Smackdown

by Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball on January 8, 2015

MoMA’s garden, image courtesy of MoMA

Tina Barney, who’s known for semi-intimate portraits of her family, often in Lilly Pulitzer, joins Paul Kasmin gallery. [artnet News]
Photographer Lisa Oppenheim joins Tanya Bonakdar. [Art News]
Wes Anderson’s cinematographer describes shooting nine iconic Wes Anderson-y scenes. Some interesting nuggets: He says Disney executives wanted to cut the establishing montage from Rushmore. Wes Anderson arranged all the hair on the sink in Richie’s suicide attempt scene in The Royal Tenenbaums. They filmed in different aspect ratios to set the era in The Grand Budapest Hotel. [Vulture]
JUICY: in a teaser for a Vanity Fair piece framed as a Battle of the Museums (MoMA and the Met), Glenn Lowry’s rumored to be heading to Sotheby’s from MoMA. MoMA denies rumors saying he just signed a new contract. The rest is filled with words like “blood” and “money”, and a weirdly-hyped section about MoMA’s decision whether to open its garden to the public after the next renovation. ? The piece hits stands January 13th. [Vanity Fair]
Reactive cartoons poured forth on social media yesterday in response to the shooting of colleagues from Charlie Hebdo. Intentions may have been good, but it’s a little disturbing that the Internet only ever always speeds up after a tragedy. Charlie Hebdo routinely caricatured religious figureheads like the prophet Muhammed; based on previous attacks, the press assumes that these prompted the murders. [Mashable]
Christian Viveros-Faune on Tania Bruguera’s “Tatlin’s Whisper” for artnet News. Bruguera was arrested in Cuba last Tuesday in an attempt to restage the performance first launched in 2009 for the Havana biennial in which she offered people one minute free of censorship and a loud speaker. She was subsequently released and rearrested twice and is now in custody. [Artnet News]
Christian Viveros-Faune on Sarah Thornton’s 33 Artists in 3 Acts. The book gets a thumbs down for being too nice to its subjects. That’s disappointing. 7 Days in the Art World was pretty great relative to what’s being described here. We’ll be reading the book ourselves and report back. [The Village Voice]
Does cynicism forego people’s ability to understand Thomas Hirschhorn’s housing project monuments/philosophically oriented community centers? A Blade of Grass has sourced a series of responses to our Gramsci Monument follow-up piece last year, including commentary from Anna Dezeuze, art historian and author of a book on Hirschhorn’s work; Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, curator at El Museo del Barrio; and Lex Brown, who taught and worked at the monument. Thrilled to have this conversation continued. [A Blade of Grass]
In case you missed it, bloggers have been jumping on Russell Crowe after he advised female actors over 40 to seek age-appropriate roles in order to find more work. That’s assuming that lots of those roles exist, but the desire for them is not totally ageist. Meryl Streep agrees. [Vanity Fair]

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How Do People Feel About the Gramsci Monument, One Year Later ?

by Whitney Kimball on August 20, 2014

One year after Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument came down, I wondered: was this a net gain for a Bronx housing project? Or will it ultimately be remembered as art world conscience-laundering?

I went back to the Bronx for follow-up interviews.

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Thursday Links: Thank God There’s Not a Baby on That Tractor!

by Paddy Johnson and Corinna Kirsch on May 22, 2014

Canadian politics are just as dumb as American politics. Ontario Progressive Conservatives are up in arms because Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne rode on a tractor the wrong way. Thank God she wasn’t holding a baby! [The Globe and Mail]
The Taipei Biennial 2014 just announced its artist list; its theme concerns the relationships between humans and non-humans. Artists like Sterling Ruby were chosen because they use polymers: “In the light, a new generation of artists is exploring the intrinsic properties of materials ‘informed’ by human activity, including polymers (Roger Hiorns, Marlie Mul, Sterling Ruby, Alisa Barenboym, Neil Beloufa, Pamela Rosenkranz) or the critical states of materials (the nebulizations of Peter Buggenhout, Harold Ancart or Hiorns).” Artists have been using all sorts of materials for ages, and for all sorts of reasons outside of interspecies connectivity, but who cares about that. [e-flux]
Red Lobster parent company Darden Restaurants sold the cheese-and-biscuits franchise to a capital equity firm. Hazlitt’s David Berry recaps the Lobster’s more glorious days. [Hazlitt via The Paris Review]
“Everybody told me mink are untameable — they’re the most vicious creatures alive.” Despite that warning, Jesse Hirsch began his lifelong interest in training minks to hunt. [Modern Farmer]
File under heart wrenching stories: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case For Reparations.” A must-read. [The Atlantic]
You’ve seen this before. Saving room for cats. [Saving Room for Cats]
You’ll see lots of white people looking at Kara Walker’s “A subtlety” at the Domino Sugar Factory. According to Jamilah King, “This is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s reassuring that so many white people have a vested — or at least passing — interest in consuming art that deals with race. At the same time I found it unsettling to view art by a black artist about racism in an audience that’s mostly white. It reinforced the idea that black people’s histories are best viewed but not physically experienced.” [Colorlines]
In case you missed it: A performance made in honor of the late Ana Mendieta left chicken guts out front the DIA Foundation for the Arts. [Hyperallergic]