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- I’m not sure exactly what this awesome creature is (a goat?) but I do know how he feels. [Facebook]
- Gentrification tensions in Bushwick have been running at a seemingly all-time high after neighborhood newcomer London Kaye and Bushwick Flea owner Rob Abner installed a pretty heinous crochet mural inspired by Wes Anderson on a longtime resident’s home without her permission. This Saturday, the anarchist group Brooklyn Solidarity Network staged an anti-gentrification protest at the market, which led to one very-illegal sounding fake arrest by NYPD Officer Bin-Safar. [Gothamist]
- Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, British anarchist group Class War has been organizing “Fuck Parades” to protest London gentrification. In their latest action, hundreds of masked protesters descended upon a novelty cafe that sells £3.20 (~$5) bowls of breakfast cereal on Brick Lane—once a major center for the city’s working class immigrant communities that has seen huge rent increases. [The Telegraph]
- And in a softer approach to confronting gentrification in London, Lucy Sparrow has created Madame Roxy’s Erotic Emporium, a sex shop with all hand-stitched fabric replicas of everything from porn to condom wrappers. The project is a commentary on Soho’s transformation from a “seedy” area to one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the capital. [Dezeen]
- This is so well-deserved: LaToya Ruby Frazier and Ta-Nehishi Coates are 2015 MacArthur Fellows. [Artforum]
- Amazing: Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation will be housing Frankie Knuckles’s record collection in its Stony Island Arts Bank. [Chicago Reader]
- Dia has scrapped plans for a new building in Chelsea. The proposed building, headed by previous director Philippe Vergne, promised to give the Foundation a major presence in New York, and would be situated on the footprint of two of its three existing sites in the city. It was also Vergne’s big banner project, but since moving on to MOCA, has obviously been scuttled by new director Jessica Morgan, who wants to bring “equilibrium” to all of Dia’s spaces. [Art Newspaper]
- Leftover bruschetta ham and eggplant tortellini: turns out you can eat pretty gourmet if you dumpster dive in the Upper West side. [VICE]
- Jerry Saltz weighs in on Dana Schutz and Katherine Bernhardt, and the frustratingly protracted careers of female bad-boy painters. [New York Magazine]
- Listen to this interview with Simon Denny, the Berlin-based artist who used leaked NSA PowerPoint presentations for the installation “Secret Power,” New Zealand’s Venice Biennale Pavilion. He also used Behance to track down David Darchicourt, the former NSA creative director of defense intelligence. He commissioned the graphic designer to the spies to create maps of Denny’s native New Zealand. So smart. [Marketplace]
- Lydia Cash, a painter who participated in last weekend’s Edgewater Fall Art Fair, had a large number of her paintings stolen. But she left her tent completely open and had her paintings still in view. According to the organizer’s statement, “she had done the same when she participated in our Art Fair last year.” As much as I want to have one tear streaming down my face for Cash’s plight, I think I agree with one of the story’s commenters: “don’t feel sorry for her — she left her stuff in an open tent.” [NBC Chicago]
- The Moscow Biennial faces a double whammy of a devalued Ruble and a political climate that’s not particularly friendly to contemporary art. This year’s curators Bart de Baere, Dafne Ayas, and Nicolaus Schafhausen used their shoestring budget to trim any excesses designed to cater to the market—no shipping of huge expensive artworks, for example—and focused on providing space for artists to produce new work, showing easier-to-insure photographs, and hosting small-scale interactive performances. [artnet News]
- In other Moscow news, the nonprofit art space Red Square Gallery has closed following police intimidation over an exhibition of photographs of LGBT teenagers. [The Art Newspaper]
