- Just in time for summer, here’s Star Trek: The Next Generation uniform swimsuits. Just don’t plan a vacation to pleasure planet Risa, it never works out. [Geeks Are Sexy]
- The Romanian hacker Guccifer, who famously leaked photographs of George Bush’s paintings and claims to have hacked Hillary Clinton’s private email server, has plead guilty to charges of identity theft and unauthorized access to protected computers. He faces 2-7 years in jail. [artnet News]
- Terence Dick recommends seeing Public Studio’s ambitious show at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto. The art-architectural duo have basically installed a giant LED advertising billboard inside the gallery, which is serving as light for a saplings nursery. Apparently the show touches on themes like video gaming, bioplan planting and the newly written Canadian version of the Rights of Nature. [Akimbo]
- Just announced: British artist David Shrigley has been commissioned by Public Art Fund to create a 17-foot tall granite sculpture for the Doris C. Freedman Plaza this fall. Expanding on his 2008 work Gravestone, the tombstone will have a grocery shopping list engraved with items like “sausages”, “bread” and “pasta”, which may or may not earn the ire of gluten-free boot camp vegetarians working out in Central Park. [Press Release]
- Meet the woman who was responsible for making you wear dreamy pastel nail polish in the 1990s: Dineh Mohajer, the founder of Hard Candy. Apparently, she originally made all the shades — remember Sky? — at home by mixing beauty supply store neon colors with bottles of Essie white polish. [Lenny]
- Jonathan T. D. Neil’s predictions about the future art world imagine an Asia-centric market, individualism becoming obsolete in the face of artists working on production teams, art school grads decamping for China, and digital data usurping the importance of objects. He makes a convincing argument, but it’s predicated almost entirely on market forces. If there’s one thing about the majority of artists—for better or for worse—it’s that financial considerations are usually pretty low on the priority scale when making decisions. It’s hard to imagine artists moving en masse to a country with repressive censorship, even though the world’s top dealers and auctioneers might. And there will always be people making and buying physical things. [ArtReview]
- OMG OMG OMG! The moment New Yorkers have been waiting for, 70+ years in the making: the MTA has added the Second Avenue Subway to the map. If it’s this satisfying to see the Q train snake up into the Upper East Side, just imagine how happy we’ll be decades from now when they add the teal T line. Also, the MTA is bringing the W train back into service, so that’s good news for Astoria. [New York Magazine]
- Like most of our colleagues in the media industry, we’re disgusted by Peter Thiel’s revenge campaign against Gawker. Ever since it went public earlier this week that he was the money man behind Hulk Hogan’s $140 million-winning lawsuit, it raised all sorts of press freedom questions, not to mention the need for the privately-owned media company to sell some or all of their assets to continue fighting off the lawsuits Thiel’s adamantly bankrolling. Matthew Ingram explores a valuable question though: who would invest in a company knowing a Silicon Valley billionaire is so intent on destroying by any means necessary? [Fortune]
- AFC senior editor Rea McNamara interviews Toronto-based painter Rajni Perera, who after years struggling in the city’s conservative commercial gallery world, is finding a lot of success in the emerging Southeast Asian art market with her fantastical, third culture perspective embellished photography. This is what the commercial gallery hustle looks like if you don’t live in a traditional art capital or make beige landscapes for all-white homes. [FADER]
- Austin, Texas is booming in population, but its black residents are being pushed out to the suburbs at an alarming rate. It’s such an extreme case of displacement-by-gentrification that the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin exhaustively studied the issue. Their findings are one more warning sign of the impending crisis of slumburbia. The nation’s suburbs were never built to be good places for low-income residents, but that’s where they’re heading as cities get too expensive. [Grist]
- Lucinda Barnes, UC Berkeley Art Museum’s chief curator, is stepping down. Barnes has been with the museum and film archive since 2001, and curated shows by Joan Jonas and Hans Hoffmann. She’ll retire next month. [Artforum]
