- Thomas Campbell, having been forced out of his position of Director due to budget woes and inappropriate romantic relationships, tells the Art Newspaper he left because he’d done everything right and there was nothing left to do. Sure buddy. [The Art Newspaper]
- Some art doesn’t stand the test of time. A good example: Aire D’attente an artistic revitalization of an abandoned lot that grew flax, barley, and hemp. Police destroyed it after erroneously concluding it was a pot farm. [Hyperallergic]
- Iowa City has a new 175 foot mural featuring fruits and vegetables. [Press Citizen]
- Oooh, a Kusama infinity room of pumpkins! The Dallas Museum of Art has acquired it. [Dallas News]
- Seattle’s Mount Analogue is hosting an inflatable art show. [Seattle Weekly]
- Are you fucking kidding me? There’s an invite-only app that allows some New Yorkers to change the spire colors of skyscrapers. There’s also now a black market for the app where invites sell for $100 each. This is so dumb. [Curbed]
This GIF comes from Tumblr user Killer Angel 123. It feels like a fitting postcard from the internet if you’re feeling summertime blues. Isn’t #FOMO resentment slowly killing us all? I blame the advent of the Instagram “story” feature.
While the big galleries are still at the beach, the city’s museums and artist-run initiatives continue to keep us on our toes. Case and point: the Whitney’s opening the first US retrospective of Brazilian art/activism pioneer Hélio Oiticica on Friday. Speaking of art/activism, there are plenty of opportunities to get engaged this week, including talks at SVA on Wednesday and SOHO20 gallery on Sunday. The weekend’s real highlight, though, is Crushed, the inaugural Brooklyn Dirty Book Fair. Organized by former AFC teammate Matthew Leifheit, we’re expecting that to be great. Artist-made porn? Weird performances involving cake? A pop-up exhibition of vintage queer zines? Check, check, and check! We’ll see you there!
Paul Fusco, from Robert Kennedy Funeral Train, USA (1968) © Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos. Courtesy International Center of Photography
- Paul Fusco’s photograph of mourners watching Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train, now on view in Magnum Manifesto at the International Center of Photography, is Christian Viveros-Fauné’s must-see pick in New York right now. [Art Agency, Partners]
- The NYT profiles Carter Burden Gallery, which only shows artists who are at least sixty years old. [The New York Times]
- Brad Troemel is calling out Russian designer Vika Gazinskaya on social media. Her Spring 2018 collection, shown recently at Paris Fashion Week, appears to blatantly plagiarize his paintings. Gazinskaya has since admitted that Troemel inspired her work, but had not credited the references because she didn’t know his name. [ARTnews]
- Heather Dewey-Hagborg upcoming show at Fridman Gallery sounds really creepy. The artist worked with Chelsea Manning while the latter was imprisoned. Photographs of Manning were prohibited, so to construct a “portrait”, Dewey-Hagborg extrapolated possible faces from a DNA sample. These are the results of that process. [U.S. News]
- Whoa. South African artist Zanele Muholi filmed her Airbnb host throwing her friend, filmmaker Sibahle Nkumbi, down the stairs of an apartment building in Amsterdam. Nkumbi ended up in the hospital. The man is being charged with attempted manslaughter.[artnet News]
- Cringe-inducing relational aesthetics idea of the century: Kristian von Hornsleth has attached GPS tracking units to homeless people in London, who can then be “bought” as “human Tamagotchi” and tracked by collectors for £25,000. Why are people so awful? [The Sun]
- Xenia Rubinos’ “Mexican Chef” is the danceable social justice jam of the Summer. [YouTube]
Not sure how I missed this, but the New York Times ran a story in June listing all the ways you can insert GIFs into your conversations faster. These include keyboard apps with GIF short cuts like Google’s Gboard, and PopKey, plus the GIPHY website. Somehow this article ran without any image at all, though. We’re here to fix that with our own choice of GIFs. If the Times can’t pick a GIF, we’ll pick one for them! Thanks to Adam Pizurny, the artist behind this GIF (and previously featured here.) Woo hoo!
As an artist who moved out of New York City, I’m not alone in finding new energy, inspiration and freedom. My move was from Brooklyn to Asheville, North Carolina. But when I noticed multiple long-established New York galleries also making such moves, it surprised me. Don’t galleries have to stay close to collectors?
This is what the SF MoMA robot thinks clouds look like. The photograph is by Paul Strand
- The Art Southampton and Art Hampton fairs won’t be running this summer. Don’t worry though, in their place…other fairs will run. Good grief – can’t art fairs ever take a vacation? In good news, Bill Powers is organizing a fair called “Upstairs” which will be held in a barn in Amagansett. That’s definitely an upgrade on the standard fair experience the other Hampton fairs offered. [artnet News]
- Arthur Jafa, an artist represented by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, created the video for the title track on JAY Z’s new album 4:44. [ARTnews]
- Betty Parsons was a great, well known dealer but also an under recognized artist. John Yau reviews her show at Alexander Gray Associates and raves about it. [Hyperallergic]
- New York is exploring a type of zoning called “managed retreat” in flood prone parts of Staten Island. These neighborhoods were gravely damaged during Sandy and now the government wants to keep some of those areas empty for safety purposes – hence the experimentation with managed retreat. [Curbed]
- Here’s a breath of fresh air – art runs led by Marnie Kunz that aren’t being contextualized as some sort of relational aesthetics bullshit. (Yes, these projects exist and they are across-the-board dumb.) [Runner’s World]
- Museums will do anything to demonstrate engagement in their collection. To wit, SF MoMA has a next text message program where you text them “Send me ___” (you fill in the blank) and they send you back a picture from their collection that reflects that. Their robot could use some help. I asked for fluffy clouds and I got a message back telling me they didn’t have any images like that. Then I asked for a picture of “clouds” and got a picture of an oil refinery. Text 572-51 for pictures you didn’t ask for. [Lifehacker]
- Brooklyn Artist Works Primarily With Steamed Milk. [Hard Times]
This GIF combines two of my alltime favorite things from 1993—Star Trek: The Next Generation and Haddaway’s club banger “What is Love”—by superimposing Riker, Picard, and Data onto the Night at the Roxbury guys. Amazing.
Michael Anthony Farley continues his L.A. tour. Artist Megan Gordon shows him around Chinatown, a champagne bus strands him at the beach, and drag queens get patriotic.
- People finding “Accidental Wes Anderson” locations is the best new internet trend. [My Modern Met]
- Housing lotteries open this week for two new affordable housing buildings in Williamsburg, where rents start at $589/month. Definitely worth the long-shot of applying. Worth noting the affordable units in the Bronx start at $880. [Curbed]
- Basically every British cultural institution (and plenty of mainland European ones) have signed a letter urging the UK government to not fuck them over in Brexit plans. [Dezeen]
- The VGA, or Video Game Art Gallery, will be Chicago’s first art space dedicated to video game based artists’ projects. [DNAinfo]
- The Green family (of Hobby Lobby wealth and infamy) has been ordered to pay $3 million in fines for smuggling artifacts from the Middle East to their businesses. This might cast a shadow over their forthcoming (and already dubious) Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. [The Washington Post]. ←— assholes
- Aman Mojadidi’s ‘Once Upon a Place’, in which obsolete phone booths have been installed in Times Square with the stories of immigrants, was conceived of before the Trump regime. Now, it’s taken on new relevance, obviously. [ARTnews]
- The “Is it art?” cliche just never runs out of steam. A Wired article explores a terrible art project that involves sticking some pictures into executable code and seeing what it does to the faces. Apparently said code is AI but how it works is never explained. The work looks like a souped up version of Datamoshing, which the new media community long ago discarded as too limited in its formula to ever produce good art. [Wired]
- I dunno how to feel about Mia Fineman’s Talking Pictures: Camera Phone Conversations Between Artists. It’s a good idea for a show, and we know that mostly because other artists have been doing it. [The New York Times]
- Cherokee writer America Meredith weighs in on the surreal case of Jimmie Durham’s fake Native ancestry. It’s an interesting, nuanced read. [artnet News]
