by Michael Anthony Farley on February 16, 2017
FIN – Daughters from FIN on Vimeo.
- Read how FIN (Rebecca Fin Simonetti), FlucT (Monica Mirabile & Sigrid Lauren), and Eartheater (Alexandra Drewchin) secretly filmed a singularly weird music video in The Met on phones. [DAZED]
- This should come as a surprise to absolutely no one: art workers are saddled with debt and are underpaid. This increasingly means only the adult children of parents with cash to spare for financial help can afford to work in the arts. [Artsy]
- The Davis Museum at Wellesley College is protesting Trump’s visa ban by removing or shrouding works in their collection either created or donated by immigrants. [The Art Newspaper]
- Just how bad is New York’s housing shortage? When Williamsburg’s 325 Kent opened its lottery for affordable (under $1,000/month) units, 87,000 people applied for 104 apartments. [Curbed]
- Related: cities from New York to New Orleans are scrambling to figure out affordable artist housing solutions, as gentrification threatens the cultural tourism industry. Good luck. [Huffington Post]
- For now, the City of Edinburgh is leaving a mysterious sculpture (some have attributed it to Banksy) of a little girl reaching for a nautical mine in place. It appeared overnight in time for Valentine’s Day in the city’s Scott Monument. [BBC]
- In other UK news, the South Downs Heritage Centre decided to remove a bunch of Victorian-era nude photographs from an art exhibit after a group of elderly visitors found them obscene. I literally LOLed reading this story. Depending on your coworkers, this link might be NSFW. [Daily Mail]
- Uh, gross. There’s an outbreak of a rare, deadly rat-borne disease in the Bronx. It’s spread by contact with rat pee. If you live in the Bronx, don’t touch rat pee. [The New York Times]
- Following Paddle8’s split from German startup Auctionata, the online auction house has been “gutted” of staff. Layoffs seem to have hit hard, and cofounder/former CEO Aditya Julka has departed. [ARTnews]
- Oh dear god Bjarne Melgaard’s fashion “purge” at Red Bull Studios (in which the artist invited the public to look his half-a-million-dollar wardrobe) looks insane and I wish I could’ve been there. [artnet News]
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by Michael Anthony Farley on February 9, 2017
Last year, I remarked that Zona MACO excels at being an “average” art fair.
I stand by that opinion this year, with the clarification that it feels a bit like the average of many art fairs: a bit of NADA, a big dollop of Design Miami, a dose of Basel, and flavors of Frieze. That makes sense, as it’s by far Latin America’s largest and most important art fair—many of the curated identities of fairs in hyper-saturated US markets come from necessity of branding when there’s competition.
And like I said last year, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Though this year, due to some floor plan rearrangements and somewhat less cohesive booths, the curated sections Zona MACO Sur and Nuevas Propuestas felt a bit underwhelming. That might also owe to (what seemed like) an increase in advertisers’ kiosks and design, publication, and food vendors, comparatively.
The good news: the quality of work in the General Section improved tremendously. Sure, there were many repeat, predictable artist, but the recent political turns in both Mexico and the United States haven’t gone unnoticed in the art world, thankfully. Scattered among the rows of polite abstraction, there was plenty of outright political work, particularly when compared to the December fairs in Miami.
Below, a sampling of the what’s on view, beginning with some of the more overtly political works.
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