Noam Rappaport, “Untitled (RCT),” 2012. Courtesy the artist.
- In San Francisco, a 6-foot-tall dolphin sculpture falls on a 2-year-old boy and he dies. Public service announcement: Don’t let your kids climb on a sculpture at an art gallery called Friday Majestic Collection Art Gallery. [Boston.com]
- Obama will impose a 10 percent limit on student loan repayments. [Chicago Tribune]
- Art critic Ben Davis writes about Twitch, a massively popular website where you can watch and chat with people playing video games. In Ben Davis fashion, we get reminded of the constant political fact that popular entertainment is awful: “…video games, which are, after all, commercial products, precision-engineered instruments of distraction.” [New York Magazine]
- Chicago’s been big on social practice art for some time, and now more of the city’s universities are catching on. The University of Illinois at Chicago has hired artist Laurie Jo Reynolds to become the school’s first-ever assistant professor of public arts, social justice, and culture. [Newcity Art]
- This is not okay: James Franco has been caught slut-shaming Lindsay Lohan. He published a short story on VICE on how he definitely did not sleep with this “damaged” starlet. [MTV]
- A new study by the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts shows that people consistently prefer art that is authored by one rather than multiple artists. Apparentlytwo isn’t better than one. [Hyperallergic]
- Guccifer, the hacker who leaked former president George W. Bush’s nude self portraits, is being sentenced to four years in prison [Gawker]
- Painter Ben Shattuck worked with Sandra Harmel, a historian based in Iowa to find locations that were recorded as being part of the underground railroad. Based on that research, he’s produced a remarkably cliché and academic body of work that got a write up in the New Yorker. [The New Yorker]
- An interview with Los Angeles-based painter Noam Rappaport. The interview most concerns itself with the minutia of process, yet somehow it never gets tedious. [Artspace]
