Flamin’ debate on the e-flux message board over whether art that utilizes cryptocurrency can provide an exit from contemporary art. [e-flux conversations]
Only Japan would be fertile ground to birth a realistic cat head like the one made by these design students in Tokyo. [Laughing Squid]
The artists responsible for putting Edward Snowden’s bust in Fort Greene Park want it back from the police. [The Brooklyn Paper]
Dealer Edward Winkleman’s blog is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary, and it’s still going strong. One recent example: “How Transparency Might Just Save the Art Market,” which offers a common sense explanation for why increasing transparency around online sales could benefit good for the primary market. Start reading, nerds. [Edward Winkleman]
Creative Time is just one of the international organizations restaging Tania Brugera’s “Tatlin’s Whisper #6”; so is the Tate, London; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Van Abbe Museum, Amsterdam; and Witte de With, Rotterdam. [Tate]
Look who’s renting a U-Haul! Dan Duray reports that Venus Over Manhattan founder Adam Lindemann is opening a new gallery in Los Angeles this spring. The 15,000-square-foot space is right in the middle of the city’s downtown art scene. A choice pull quote from Lindemann: “If you come out to see me you can go to five other galleries and a museum,” he said, “Kinda worth it, right?” [ARTnews]
Maybe Emma Sulkowicz’s “Mattress Project” Carry That Weight” isn’t so great for feminism after all? [The New Yorker]
Paul Almond, director of the Seven Up! series passed away at the age of 83. [The New York Times]
Chicago chef Homaro Cantu was founded dead yesterday in an apparent suicide. He ran Moto, a Michelin Star rated restaurant known for his use of chemical-laboratory techniques to turn food into weird new forms. [The New York Times]
Robot Glockenspiel Performs Popcorn. [YouTube and above]
In contemporary art museums, columns are going the way of gluten. Both the Broad and the Whitney tout their soon-to-come “column-free” exhibition spaces. High-ceilinged, flexible spaces are one way to keep pace with changes in contemporary art practices, but, turns out, adding or adjusting moveable walls as needed is a giant pain in the ass. [The Art Newspaper]
Creative Time’s gesture of solidarity with Cuban artist and sometime political prisoner Tania Bruguera underwhelmed one journalist, who made note of how hashtags supplanted loudspeakers as the choice medium for transgressively involving the public, and how the public art project largely ignored the immediate public.You know that zen koan, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Looks like the answer is yes, if enough people tweet about it. [Hyperallergic]
Wow. Art in General will leave it’s home in Tribeca after 34 years. Their lease is up. [Artnet News]
Google image searches may actually shape the way we perceive the world. Mostly because believing everything you see is the new believing everything you read. [The Atlantic]
According to UC-Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education estimated 25% of all adjunct professors receive some form of public assistance.* [Slate]
*Here’s a video of a bunch of kittens riding a roomba to help you through that last article. [YouTube]
Still no word on who will run the new .art domain, but .sucks up and working as of June 1st. Looks like ICANN, the group that manages domain name systems, figured out there’s a lot of money to be made from Internet trolls; the fact that this domain name event exists suggests they knew it would would be popular. Naturally, there is already controversy: The company that will administer the new domain, a Canadian-based company called Vox Populi, is charging $2,500 for the website names — far more than a typical website registration of $10 to $25. The Intellectual Property Constituency, an advisory group to the global Internet domain regulator, has already complained. Is this just a shakedown to get money from companies and others? After the June 1 deadline, online trolls or “cybersquatters” could buy up the names and then extort even higher prices, according to the group which includes film, software and music industry associations and other trademark organizations. [Yahoo]
The Creative Time Summit is streaming live now from Sweden. New Yorkers can also go see people talk about DIGITAL LABOR: SWEATSHOPS, PICKET LINES, AND BARRICADES with a time-delayed screening of the talks at the New School. [Creative Time streaming / New School conference]
Chinese shoppers using the website Alibaba, only had four days to purchase T-shirts that support Ai Weiwei before Alibaba shut the site down. [The New York Times]
More bad press for Ryder Ripps’s “ART WHORE”, a project in which he hired two sensual masseuses to make drawings for him at The Ace Hotel to demonstrate how his labor is being exploited. We didn’t like the project, Rhizome didn’t like the project, and Gawker doesn’t like it either. “Instead of opening that exploitation up for inspection, he hides it, making his sex workers into silent players in a drama about the aggrievement of Ryder Ripps.” [Gawker]
R.A. Montgomery, the author of Choose Your Own Adventure books passed away last Sunday at the age of 78. [Choose Your Own Adventure via Metafilter]
I think Christian Viveros-Fauné likes these Neo Rausch paintings at David Zwirner? It’s mostly a descriptive review. [Artnet]
Final Fantasy 3 and Enter the Wu-Tang were both released 20 years ago. Someone on the Internet noticed that. The mash up is better than you’d think. [2 Mello via Metafilter]
“Is it irresponsible bullshit or harmlessly fatuous?” If you actively hate the Times’s Styles section, as many do, then Jacqui Shine’s comprehensive history is a must-read. The section is often empty elitism that’s late on everything, aggressively dismissive, and totally out of touch. But ultimately, it’s a mix, revealing a history of misogyny and barriers in women’s and gay journalism; the section allowed women like Charlotte Curtis to break from the women’s desk and a gaying of the paper. “Yes, it does function as a powerful critical lens on contemporary life. Yes, it is devoted to the pleasures of affluence. Yes, sometimes it is absurd. And yes, the writers and editors do seem pretty self-aware about all of these things,” Shine writes. [The Awl]
Rejoice, for artful economist Felix Salmon now has his byline in the New Yorker. Glad to have more of his insights on the art market’s many, many paradoxes. [The New Yorker]
GULF Labor unfurls a(nother) banner inside the Guggenheim to protest the museum’s labor practices. [@occupymuseums]
How did we miss this? Yesterday marked the first-ever Britney Spears Day, a holiday created by the city of Las Vegas. [Aplus]
Years late to the news, the New York Times declares Ridgewood an up-and-coming neighborhood for hipsters. [The New York Times]
Creative Time will be livestreaming this year’s summit at select locations. FOR FREE. The Vera List Center for Art and Politics will host the NY screening. [Creative Time]
If you’re wrapping up your reading on Prospect.3 this week, don’t forget to check out Julia Halperin’s breakdown of the biennial’s demographics. [The Art Newspaper]
Viewers complain that last week’s Doctor Who episode was too scary. [Telegraph]
Germany’s Wiesbaden Museum wants to purchase a Nazi-looted paintings—rather than returning the work to its owners. As a money-raising strategy, the museum has begun hanging the painting so that it faces the wall. For Wiesbaden, that turnaround stunt might generate publicity; we’re not convinced that greater awareness will necessarily bring in more dough. [Tablet]
Image of the “Digital Sugar Baby”, courtesy of Creative Time and Makeable
“[P]hoto bans reek of cultural snobbery and outdated thinking,” argues Business Insider’s Ben Winsor– citing an Lower East Side show (“Red Hot”, about hot redheads) that comes with Instagram tags and its own twitter account. Magda Sawon agrees; Tyler Green thinks yes, except at MoMA. If you want a look at this policy in action, go to the next Creative Time event. Every single person seemed to be looking at Kara Walker’s sugar sphynx through a cell phone. (They arranged them into 360 degree digital gallery of it). It’s democracy, but it also feels like a tourist trap when you’re there. As we linked last week, Arts Council England is discussing the idea of making a special “no photos” hour in museums, like a quiet car on a train. [Business Insider]
The New York Times Public Editor comes down hard on the Shonda Rhimes article written by TV critic Alessandra Stanley that’s been accused of racism. “Intended to be in praise of Ms. Rhimes, it delivered that message in a condescending way that was – at best – astonishingly tone-deaf and out of touch.” [The New York Times]
Click on the square that is the lighter color. It’s an easy game until it’s not—it’s certainly harder than 2048. [Color Lang via Metafilter]
Speaking of which, this Pantone color vision test is also strangely addicting. Try to arrange the boxes in a perfect spectrum. [X-Rite]
Incredible: Hyperallergic went to #FloodWallStreet, a protest that according to its press release aims to “Stop Capitalism. End the Climate Crisis”, and provided live coverage from morning til night. They even have an interview with Martha Rosler. [Hyperallergic]
And in front page news, America and five Arab allies strike ISIS targets in Syria. [The New York Times]
Blondie’s 40th anniversary will be celebrated in a week long exhibition curated by Jeffrey Deitch at the Chelsea Hotel’s Storefront Gallery and will include photographs taken by the band’s co-founder Chris Stein and band memorabilia. [T Magazine]
ARGGHGHHhghghghrghghgh. There will be no global climate agreement at the UN Summit, now, or possibly, ever. Instead, humanity must hope for bilateral agreements between the US and China, or the US and Brazil. “[W]e might be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together with that kind of a plan B,” says Michael Jenkins of Forest Trends. Fuck. [NPR]
Finally, a review of State of the Art, the massive survey show of contemporary art at Crystal Bridges in Arkansas. It’s generally positive and remarks on how nice it is to see a show that isn’t full of bets on the market. Read the comment section for a bit of fun—it’s full of praise in one turn, and provincial complaints on the other. [Glasstire]
Celebrities continue to come up with dumb performance art ideas, and museums seem to have no choice but to cater to their every whim. [artnet News]
Actor John Malkovich and photographer Sandro Miller have teamed up to recreate famous photographs, each now starring Malkovich. The new photographs are mildly disturbing and say what exactly? [Peta Pixel]
Who wants to puke and shit in a bucket and watch all of your life’s most traumatic experiences unfold before your eyes for what feels like days on end? This is what Ayahuasca did to VICE’s Conor Creighton, who would do it all again. [VICE]
Dumb, Dumb and Dumber, Exhibit A: Damien Hirst’s Rosary.
FIFA claims that 12% of the worlds population (or 900 million people) watched at least some of the World Cup final. Novelist Teju Cole, designer Jeb Thorpe, and artist Mario Klingemann created a time-based collage of photos of the game posted to twitter, each photo layered on top of the next so the TV consistently falls at the same place on the screen. This is a terrible project. Aesthetically, the only device used is the light of the TV as an anchor—which it already is—and a photoshop transparency filter to show the multitudes of people watching at the same time. This is a study in sameness. [The Atlantic]
As if the Jeff Koons H&M bag wasn’t enough: Damien Hirst starts a jewellery line. One of the pieces? A rosary with a golden pill instead of a crucifix. [Artnet]
Speaking of Damien Hirst, cutting out a site-specific Damien Hirst dot painting from the wall, does not mean you own it. “The ownership of a wall painting in the series titled Wall Spots always resides with the owner of the Wall Spots signed certificate, which accompanies the art work.” [Animal New York]
Carolina Miranda says the 9/11 Museum doesn’t give you any place to be alone with your thoughts, a quality in direct contrast with September 11th, which turned NYC into a stony silent city. [Culture: High & Low]
Creative Time is hiring an Editorial Fellow to work run their Creative Time Reports blog. Debate on twitter rages over whether a Art History, Journalism or other related MA or PhD, PhD should be strongly preferred for a salary of 40K a year. (The consensus appears to be that at least the PHD should be a “no”.) And yet, Creative Time’s numbers aren’t that far out of line with the mandated NIH post-doc salaries. Basically, Creative Time will pay a fellow $5000 less than medical researchers over the course of two years. [NYFA Classifieds]
Anti-immigrant graffiti sparks supremely dumb debate (if you can even call it that). [Gawker]
Today in very large numbers: Christie’s sells $4.5 billion in art in the first half of 2014. It’s hard to be surprised anymore by the fact that, indeed, auction houses bring in a ton of money. But this seems noteworthy; Sales are up 22% from the same period last year. Will growth this exponential be sustainable? [The Wall Street Journal]
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic claims that Millennial’s political views “don’t make any sense.” [The Atlantic]
Last week, 100 artists called for participants to withdraw from Creative Time’s traveling exhibition, “Living as Form”. It is currently showing at The Technion, a space in Israel that is known to work closely with the Israeli government on military technology.
Man in the Mirror, Image courtesy of http://www.fanpop.com
A 150-point listicle that attempts to create a schlock song cannon. Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” takes the 23rd position. Boyz II Men’s, “End of the Road”, takes #26. This is a thoughtful listicle! [Vulture]
Charles Saatchi plans to sell Tracey Emin’s My Bed at Christie’s. Though she thinks its valuation at ~£1m could put it out of reach of museums, Emin hopes this is the last time it’s sold. “It’s still my bed,” Emin tells The Art Newspaper. “I love it.” [The Art Newspaper]
Famed choreographer William Forsythe is stepping down from the helm of his own company, Forsythe Dance Company. [ArtsBeat]
Tiernan Morgan criticizes Jayson Musson’s show at Salon 94 for being not specific enough in their critique of the art world. [Hyperallergic]
Around the country, 50,000 billboards will be transformed into art. [Fast Company]
An article mostly without a point, but perhaps about MoMA’s expansion? The whole piece seems to be built on wrong headed assumptions and is backed up by anonymous quotes without any explanation for why they are anonymous. [Quartz]
Looks like Creative Time’s seeking more unpaid volunteers to basically act as security guards for its massive Kara Walker show. This, one month after it raised $1.3 million at its benefit fundraiser. [NYFA]
Godard made a 3D film, and people are freaking out. Rhett Jones reports that one shot, which makes people’s eyes inadvertently cross, blew away Cannes audiences so much that the entire audience stood up and applauded. [Animal New York]
Fiercely Independent. New York art news, reviews and culture commentary. Paddy Johnson, Editorial Director Michael Anthony Farley, Senior Editor Whitney Kimball, IMG MGMT Editor
Contact us at: paddyATartfcity.com