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Wednesday Links: Tonya Harding Still Muse for Artists

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on June 14, 2017

Animal rights activists in Athens smashed windows and threw paint on the studio of Aboubakar Fofana, whose Documenta 14 piece comprises 54 sheep dyed different shades of indigo. The dye is apparently nontoxic, so I’m not sure what the problem here is. If I were a sheep, I’d be happier being a piece of living artwork rather than mutton. [The Art Newspaper]
So, this is a job that exists: “Art curator for a cannabis company”. Meet Burgandy Viscosi, who picks the artwork for different strains of pot for a Washington marijuana company. [Leafly]
Daniel H. Weiss will take the helm at the Met as its president and chief executive. He takes over for Thomas P. Campbell, who was forced out of the position of chief executive and director due to the financial mismanagement and conflict of interest scandals that plagued his leadership. Weiss, will help find a director, as, unlike Campbell, he will not be overseeing both the artistic and financial direction of the museum. Much a do has been made about this, but the idea that any person can effectively fill both positions is misguided at best imo. This is a step in the right direction. [The New York Times]
Not to do with art, but the Gwyneth Paltrow Goop summit sure seems to reveal that line of product as being a total and utter sham (if the jade eggs you’re supposed to insert in your vagina weren’t enough evidence on their own.) Lectures included a talk on “integrative photosynthesis,” “spiritual Wi-Fi,” “laterality to the body,” “neuro-vegetative signs” and “the ontological experience called your life.”, a panel discussion about gut in which panelists claimed that that kale, superfood of the millennium, can be extremely dangerous; that taking one Advil or Aleve “is like swallowing a hand grenade” and that cancer does not exist among wild animals. It seems ever talk was punctuated with opportunities for guests to go buy vastly overpriced Goop products at the IRL store set up for the summit. [The New York Post]
From documentaries and musical theater to art collections, Tonya Harding has become an unlikely muse for the arts in the decades following her 1994 violent feud with fellow figure skater Nancy Kerrigan. Erik Piepenburg considers why. [The New York Times]
The Riga Biennial (how many biennials does the world need?) is hiring a Curator of Public Programmes for their 2018 edition. Applications are due on the 24th. [e-flux]
There are $89 million worth of Basquiats on view at this year’s Art Basel. artnet News has a roundup of the works. It kinda seems like only two of these are really good? [artnet News]
We’ve never heard of UNDO Project Space in Chelsea, but John Ortved is RAVING about Alison S.M. Kobayashi’s Say Something Bunny, a performance based on an amateur audio recording made over 60 years ago that’s part detective story, part monologue, part tragicomedy. That’s not too dissimilar to our own Rea McNamara, who last year lauded the performance. [Vogue]
Adam Rogers’ tempered criticism of Norman Foster’s new Apple campus in Cupertino is a good read. Basically, it’s a building out of 1950s corporate suburban sprawl that reinforces some of the Bay Area’s biggest problems. [Wired]

GIF of the Day: Sasha Katz

by Michael Anthony Farley on May 11, 2017

Whitney Kimball once remarked rather astutely that “plants are no longer a trend; they are a medium”.

It’s certainly the most beneficial zeitgeist we’ve observed in a while—the indoor air quality at art fairs has never been better! These GIFs from Sasha Katz don’t serve that utility, but might point to another environmental concern. There’s just so much damned e-waste everywhere! For all the greenwashing of Apple’s brand-spanking-NuvaRing campus (surrounded by parking in the midst of suburban sprawl), they sure seem to like designing consumer products with toxic components that outlast their usable lives by several millennia.

Isn’t it nice to picture your iPad, fallen victim to Apple’s notorious built-in-obsolescence, having a second life as a succulent planter? Until we get some real corporate responsibility, it might be the best we can do.

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Thursday Links: Gun Violence Solutions?

by Rhett Jones on August 4, 2016

After a year-long campaign by the activist group New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, Apple has replaced its revolver emoji with a squirt gun. I guess that’s progress. [Hyperallergic]
Architects are also trying their hands at curbing gun violence. Spurred by terrorist attacks and mass shootings, a new interest in safety and making people feel safer has arisen in the architecture community. Phrases like “natural surveillance” are a little unnerving but the focus on making people feel less isolated seems like a step in the right direction. [Motherboard]
Antiques have declined in overall value by 45% since 2002 so antique fairs are jumping into the contemporary art market. [The Guardian]
That guy who made the art pricing app filled with stolen images and data says it will be coming back. His argument is that many of the images are user generated and that no one is calling for Instagram to be taken down. It’s true, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc are billion dollar businesses built on copyright violation. This guy’s still kind of a jackass though. [The Art Newspaper]
Looks like Moscow’s Garage museum is putting that VICE money to use. It will expand to a second location on New Holland Island in St. Petersburg. [ArtNews]
An inspired journalist from The Hollywood Reporter has answered the question of how tiny Donald Trump’s hands are. The exclusive information was obtained by walking down to Madame Tussaud’s and measuring Trump’s wax figure. So now, dear reader, you too can compare your hands to Donald Trump’s. They’re pretty tiny. For a 6’ 2”, 200 pound man, they’re very tiny. [The Hollywood Reporter]
Bill Viola is set to install a second video work at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The work, entitled “Mary,” will be a companion piece to Viola’s Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) from 2014. [The Art Newspaper]
Jens Hoffman is leaving his position as deputy director at the Jewish Museum. He’ll still handle special exhibitions and will be working with other institutions. [ArtNews]
Photographer Jeff Wall is joining go-go-Gagosian after spending 25 years with Marian Goodman. [New York Times]

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IMG MGMT: Pinch-to-Zoom

by Jeremy Bailey on May 24, 2016

Really when you think about it, artists like me are a lot like inventors; we bring new ideas to life that change the world. But world-changing inventors, both good and evil, are currently at war. Big mean tech companies like Google, Apple and Samsung are being granted hundreds of patents that encroach upon the free spirit of the altruistic artist. At risk: the future of self expression. Now more than ever, the world needs us all to be inventors.

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Johnny Rogers on Pyongyang Apple Store

by Michael Anthony Farley on January 6, 2016

Artist Johnny Rogers has turned to social media for product development ideas. These crowd-sourced designs will be unveiled next month at his bootleg “Pyongyang Apple Store” inside Current Gallery.

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Tuesday Links: George Zimmerman Continues to Troll Us

by Paddy Johnson Michael Anthony Farley Rea McNamara on August 18, 2015

Image credit: New York Daily News

George Zimmerman is a painter, apparently. His latest works? Paintings of Confederate flags that you can buy prints of from a gun dealer’s website. There’s also a contest involved. [TMZ]
The NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association somehow manages to be even more Orwellian than its name. The group has been encouraging off-duty police officers to photograph the city’s booming homeless population. Those images have been posted to the Association’s social media accounts in some sort of attempt to …shame people into not being homeless? [Hyperallergic]
Dragan Espenschied weighs in on Blingee’s imminent “sunsetting”, and what made it so attractive to artists with an internet-based practice: it was a web 2.0 “stupid” image-making tool with a distinct aesthetic (glitter!) operating within a web 1.0 community model. “Looking at a blingee in blingee display mode is like going through a 1990’s free graphics collection that amateurs used to exchange elements for their homepages.” Also: apparently Blingee’s super-users were Russian grandmothers. Who knew? [One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age]
The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation has just announced that it will offer funding to select New York Organizations in the following sectors: arts education, public art, art in community and service centers, artistic activism, community-based museums, expanded access to art, art in the service of social justice or change and the promotion of under-recognized artistic practice. [The Observer]
Gilbert Vicario has been hired by the Phoenix Art Museum as the new curator of contemporary art, a position the museum hasn’t seen filled in over a decade. This comes in the midst of a major personnel exodus and re-shuffle under the new museum directorship of Amada Cruz. [Artforum]
Charlotte, North Carolina now has the rarefied status right of having an all-Drake radio station on their FM dial. Jealous! [CBC]
“If a company like Samsung with sufficiently deep pockets can keep battling until [the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office] eventually decides that maybe its patents should never have been awarded in the first place, what’s the point?” Apple loses one of its design patents, and its lawsuit with Samsung continues. Eye roll. [Cult of Mac]
Check out this slideshow archive of photographs, news clippings, and posters from Baltimore’s defunct Proposal Gallery. The artist-run space rented a storefront for $1 a year in the late 70s/early 80s. You know, back when you could buy a house for a dollar. This is why my generation is so bitter. [City Paper]
That time period is the subject of a new exhibition at Frankfurt’s Städel Museum. Figurative—and in particular, “bad”—painting made a comeback in West Germany as a reaction to minimalism. Bonus: I learned a new German word, one of those impossibly long, oddly specific words for an abstraction that German does so well that we have no equivalent for. “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” is to come to terms with the past and dark history of one’s culture. [The Economist]
It’s mid-August, so you know what that means: announcements from the Toronto International Film Festival regardings its early-September slate of gala premieres and red carpet photo calls. While many focus on its significance in Hollywood — it’s People’s Choice Award is considered a precursor for Oscar glory — it’s also important for its programming of experimental and video art. So, that being said, we’re looking forward to its Wavelengths programme, and world premieres by Mark Lewis (he represented Canada at the 2009 Venice Biennale) and Mexican auteur Nicolàs Pereda. [Toronto International Film Festival]
Cy Gavin, who is presently showing at Sargent’s Daughters, incorporates materials such as his father’s cremated remains into his paintings. [The New York Times]
The six most popular art exhibitions, according to the Instagram hive-mind. [artnet News]
Internet shame army, London, Ontario police need your help: a woman has been filmed stealing flowers from a gravesite, and they are trying to identify her. [BuzzFeed]

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GIF of the Day: Yixin Cen’s Cyberfeminism

by Michael Anthony Farley on August 6, 2015

Yixin Cen’s practice spans video, interactive websites, and performative interventions. To catalogue this all, she’s created an index of preview GIFs to summarize various projects. From Code (top) to Cyberfeminism Manifesto, “an E Feminist Zine” that beautifully synthesizes old-school punk aesthetics with a hacker sensibility for the net art generation:

“WE ARE THE VIRUS OF THE NEW WORLD DISORDER
RUPTURING THE SYMBOLIC FROM WITHIN
SABOTEURS OF BIG DADDY MAINFRAME
THE CLITORIS IS A DIRECT LINE TO THE MATRIX”

And how might cyber riot grrrls smash the digital patriarchy? With the iHurt, a fictitious “data puncher” to protect women’s privacy in the era of hacked nudes and revenge porn.
From the artist: “The hammer is inspired by Apple’s commercial from 1984. The commercial from 1984 is iconic and ironic. In this commercial, a woman is destroying the system. But in 2014, the iCloud from Apple is trolling women.”

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Wednesday Links: Badass Witches

by The AFC Staff on April 22, 2015

An example of chart brut showing a demonic face in the 9/11 towers

The best art critics working today don’t identify as such. They are Internet culture critics and work at places like The Awl, Gawker, Gizmodo, et cetera. In December of 2014, Sam Biddle discussed what he calls “Chart Brut,” the markup documents of conspiracy theorists. These markup docs are all over the web right now. [Gawker]
Have you ever heard of anything more badass than a pair of witchy, gender-bending, surrealist lesbian artists (who lived next to a graveyard!!!) donning disguises to fight the Nazis? Neither have we. Meet Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. And please, someone, make a movie about their lives. [The Daily Beast via Saint Lucy]
James Rojas on the value of including artists in urban planning: “For us, the building blocks of a city comprised more than simply structures, streets, and sidewalks but equally encompassed personal experience, collective memory and narratives. We felt these were the less-tangible, but no-less-integral, elements of a city that transform mere infrastructure into place.” [KCET]
Myopia is on the rise. [The Wall Street Journal]
Donald Judd furniture is ripe for knockoffs. Calvin Klein’s furniture designs have been inspired by Judd. A reflection on what the original and the reproduction means, and to whom. Warning: It’s bit dense. [Triple Canopy]
Democrats in Congress are proposing legislation that would grant artists resale royalties, a policy known as droit de suite. We’ve discussed this before. Twice. Let’s hope this round of legislation is a little more fruitful. New York representative Jerrold Nadler: “At a time when more than 70 other countries properly compensate visual artists for their work, it is time for the United States to do the same.” Coming as a shock to no one, auction houses were pissed about last year’s similar attempt. [The Art Newspaper]
More good news from Washington: the National Endowment for the Arts is seeking an accessibility specialist whose job it would be to “assist with advocacy and technical assistance efforts for making the arts available to individuals with disabilities, older adults, and people living in institutions.” We’re not sure what the job entails, but it’s definitely a worthy endeavor. And the benefits are great. [USA Jobs]
Art collectors Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson have given the Art Institute of Chicago $400 million in art. The Art Institute’s donation comes with a crucial caveat: the museum will display the collection of 42 works for 50 years. That’s rare, for collectors to exert that type of influence. [Chicago Tribune]
Very excited about Net Art Hell, a new podcast launched by writer Gene McHugh. In each episode, he spends several minutes discussing a single work (like Faith Holland’s “Shaving Cream on RedTube”), and McHugh’s slow, monotone voice has the air of performance. [Net Art Hell]
Apparently Apple’s incursion into the Milan design fair to promote their new iWatch has been distasteful all around. Welcome to our new favorite term: iBotch. Also, why is the comments section of Dezeen the crankiest place on the internet outside of Fox News? [Dezeen]
More on Apple Land: we’re living for how much that actual Apple pavilion looks like one of the knockoff Apple Stores that have cropped up all over China in recent years. [The Guardian]

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Thursday Links: Why Wouldn’t You Want to Ooze a Pumpkin?

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on October 30, 2014

Oozing pumpkins. Need we say more? [Youtube via: Swissmiss]
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES FOR OUR REFRIGERATOR DOOR. “Our refrigerator door is currently accepting your artwork, personal essays, short fiction, and poetry for submission. Please know that we are careful about the work we publish on our refrigerator door. We want people to come away from our refrigerator door feeling invigorated and alive, as if they had just learned something about themselves and/or the world that heretofore they had not.” [McSweeney’s]
The Hirshhorn hires independent curator Gianni Jetzer to become “curator at large.” He’ll stay in New York instead of living in Washington, DC. [artnet News]
The List’s Rachel Sklar: “I’m 41, single, and pregnant.” [The Medium]
There are now eight women who are accusing the former CBC host Jian Ghomeshi of violence and sexual abuse. A masterful piece of reporting. [The Toronto Star]
Wear a drone on your wrist. [Activist Post]
Apple CEO Tim Cook has come out. “I’m proud to be gay.” [BusinessWeek]
Daniel Buren’s cathedral-like installation at Baltic Gateshead looks incredible. So, if you’re in North East England….[Contemporary Art Daily]
Another glowing review of the Chris Ofili show, this time from Benjamin Sutton. We’re not surprised he’s getting such good press; he’s a great artist. [Hyperallergic]
Good news for journalism on the web: New York Times digital subscriptions are rising. [Poynter]
Dick pics in the gallery spark questions on The Guardian about the nature of appropriation art and personal privacy, the same goddamn debate we have to have every time Richard Prince has ripped anything off since the 80s. Please get over this, people. [The Guardian]
Horror movie locations on Google maps. The only New York location is Rosemary’s Baby, whichwas shot at The Dakota, a celebrity apartment complex on 72nd and Central Park West. [Shortlist via Metafilter]
Capitalism colonizes Africa again: Nigeria rolls out a national identification card that doubles as a debit card. Sponsored by MasterCard. [How We Made It in Africa]
Nurse who just came back from West Africa, but who tested negative for ebola, is fighting a state-imposed 21-day quarantine. She plans to go to court if the state doesn’t lift it immediately. Divided opinion on this over at AFC!

Paddy: This an infringement on individual rights and will affect volunteer efforts.
Whitney: IT’S A BASIC SAFETY MEASURE
Paddy: That no scientist backs.
Whitney: Again: she would be out by November 10th. The blue water in the airplane toilet will not save you.
Paddy: You don’t need to be saved by the blue water in an airplane. You only need to be worried about sweat contagion and whatever else in the last stages of the disease.
Whitney: Like poop.
Paddy: Are passengers lining up to eat it? It’s not touching you. [Reuters]

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IMG MGMT: Pinch-to-Zoom

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