Posts tagged as:
Bartomeu Marí
by Paddy Johnson and Rea McNamara on December 17, 2015
- AFC’s Michael Anthony Farley lands the Number 1 position in City Paper’s Baltimore Power Rankings this week, beating out Democratic Presidential Nominee Bernie Sanders and Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. This may be the first time we’ve seen an art critic afforded so much influence. We approve! (Also, go Michael!) [City Paper]
- Kitty Scott, currently the curator of modern and contemporary art at the AGO, has been named the co-curator of the 2018 Liverpool Biennial. And in related news, it was announced last week that she’d be the curator of Geoffrey Farmer’s Canadian pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. [Artforum]
- “It is such a simple joy to feel the real rhythms of the city and see this perfect public sculpture, especially in an age when public space seems more and more turned by developers into private arcades for the privileged.” Jerry Saltz is a huge fan of Deborah Kass’s OY/YO sculpture, but conflicted about how mega developers are likely underwriting this new “golden age of public art”. [New York Magazine]
- A Miami art handler’s experience on that depressing hurry-up-and-wait end to the fair crazy: the de-installation. [Two Coats of Paint]
- Are we at all surprised that the big pharma collector who bought the Wu-Tang Clan album and tried to jack the price of a live-saving HIV pill has been arrested by the FBI for fraud? [Bloomberg]
- As expected, the new director of Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art is playing down the censorship controversy surrounding his hiring. While Bartomeu Marí has acknowledged that the MACBA incident was a “mistake”, he’s yet to meet the demands of South Korean artists and curators to address how he’ll contend with government censorship, a big problem for South Korean cultural institutions. [Hyperallergic]
- This interview with anonymous feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks accessibly unpacks their politics of alienation and the “illogical universalism” of the White Euro-Male perspective. Occupy the centre! [Kunsthalle Wien]
- Palestinian Canadian artist Rehab Nazzal was shot by a sniper last week while doing research in the West Bank. Shot in the leg while documenting a “skunk weapon”—basically a truck used by the Israeli Defense Forces that sprays a foul-smelling mist for crowd control—she’s in stable condition. Last year, an exhibition of her work at a gallery in Ottawa’s city hall was condemned by conservative politicians and even Israel’s ambassador to Canada, igniting a public art debate. [Canadian Art]
- Nars Foundation has a year-end benefit campaign you can donate to. They are raising money for their residency program and have brought in over $1000 of their $7000 goal. [Generosity]
- Military visions of the future are terrifying. DARPA is creating vampire drones – drones that sublimate into nothing in direct sunlight. (Isn’t that what Stealth planes already do?) Other projects include an empathic system that allows robots to identify emotional states on the field, the development of super strong lightweight materials (meh, okay), oh yeah, and communicating using nothing but our brains. [IFLScience]
- In other miracle science news, red wine apparently has the same effect on the brain as an hour at the gym. I’d love to see the sample size of that group. [The Huffington Post]
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by Michael Anthony Farley and Rea McNamara on December 8, 2015
- What is it about the Turner Prize and its media circus that always brings up the tired “But is it art?” question. That’s arguably the dumbest and least relevant discussion an artwork can generate. This year’s winners, Assemble, are a collective of former architecture students who found fanciful uses for vacant buildings in Liverpool. The daily Telegraph’s art critic Mark Hudson didn’t agree with the selection: “Why bring it in as art? If you’re just looking for stuff that isn’t pretentious and is useful, why don’t you nominate B&Q or Oxfam? … It’s great if art can be useful. But just because it’s useful doesn’t make it art.” That’s a sentiment I’m generally inclined to agree with, but it’s really not applicable here. [BBC]
- Brian Boucher shares his account of diving with artist Trevor Paglen. Paglen took a group of 10 art lovers diving 70 feet under the ocean to look at the fiber optic cables that run along the ocean floor. [artnet News]
- Zachary A. Bennett visited the SATELLITE Show and shared this account of Open Space’s “Stupid Bar,” the rowdy “competition” across the hall from our space. [Huffington Post]
- Controversy is brewing over the recent appointment of Bartomeu Marí as director of Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA). More than 340 artists—including 2015 Venice Biennale Silver Lion winner Im Heung-soon and media artist Park Chan-kyung—signed a statement questioning Marí’s record, especially in light of his handling of last spring’s censorship debacle at Barcelona’s MACBA Museum. The group is demanding reforms to protect artistic freedom, citing the South Korean government’s increasing bureaucratic restrictions on the arts. [The Korea Times]
- Would you believe this? There’s video of a woman stealing a wreath off the front door of a Toronto home at 3AM. It was silver, sparkly, and worth $200. “It’s egregarious,” said detective Frank Olsen. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard of this and I’ve been doing this a long time.” [National Post]
- Annette Kelm, the Berlin-based photographer who made the long list of the AGO’s AIMIA Prize, has won the Camera Austria Award for Contemporary Photographer. Upcoming shows include a Jens Hoffman-curated solo at Detroit’s Museum of Contemporary Art next year. [Artforum]
- The Philadelphia Daily News probably has the most on-point cover today: Trump making a Hitler salute. [@CarlAnka]
- Helpful career advice: “Dear Video Artists if you are going to have a section on your website called Current Work don’t make every single Vimeo link private?” [@MatthewLawrence]
- Buyers remorse has hit Jean Nouvel’s 100 Eleventh Avenue. The Chelsea condo is less “vision machine” and more “wind tunnel”, allege residents. Woe be the problems of a mid-aughts-designed glass curtain wall. [Curbed]
- An interview with artist Katie Rose Pipkin on her social media bots. [Furtherfield]
- Last week I [Michael] thought Vector Gallery’s Satanic Suicide Hotline was a far more subversive take on an occult lounge than the Swamp of Sagittarius at Art Basel Miami Beach. Maybe I was wrong? It turns out an altercation in the Swamp of Sagittarius led to the infamous stabbing incident. Vector might have had portraits of Charles Manson and text inciting viewers to murder, but its competition inspired an actual attempted homicide. Obviously, this was a terrible thing and horrible for all parties involved, but noteworthy as yet another parallel between the two spaces. [Gothamist]
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