Everyone probably has cookout plans, but we’ve scoured around to find some nice indoor activities for the days you’ll be spending sunburnt after the holiday (and even an excuse tonight to be hungover on your day off). It may seem like there’s slim-art-pickings in the dog days of Summer, but you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much is still going on at smaller spaces.
Philanthropist and art collector Agnes Gund sold Roy Lichtenstein’s 1962 work Masterpiece for 162 million to billionaire hedge fund manager and art collector Steve Cohen back in January for a reason. She’s funding a new project supports criminal justice reform and seeks to reduce mass incarceration in the United States. 100 million will go directly to artists who work with the incarcerated. In 2013, artist Laurie Jo Reynolds helped close Illinois’s Tamms Correctional Center, a supermax prison through art. We’re now seeing just how much impact that work has had. [The New York Times]
Thanks to criticism from Eric Trump and Fox News art looses again. Delta Airlines and Bank of America pulled promised funding from their support of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar because the Trump-like potentate is stabbed to death. [Vulture]
Yep. Sharon Needles has recreated the infamous decapitated Trump Kathy Griffin photo. This is so much better than watching celebrities try to out-do each other with the ice bucket challenge. Here are our thoughts about how the “original” wasn’t very. [Instagram]
Speaking of stupid Trump-related art controversies, the hardworking journalists at FOX News have caused an upstate high schooler’s art project to be censored. A student at Shenendehowa High School invited classmates to write on black and white headshots of the president. Of course, those statements largely comprised profanities. Ever desperate for clickbait to feed the endless moral outrage machine, FOX News somehow caught wind of this nontroversy and decided to pursue it as a “story”. The school ended up taking the project down. We live in strange, dumb times. [Times Union]
Here’s some promising news out of California. In the wake of the Ghost Ship fire, state lawmakers are debating ways to guarantee safe affordable live/work spaces for artists. The proposed SB 305 would even allocate $20 million to help fix-up artists lofts. [KQED]
Former head of the FBI James Comey testifying now! [The Internet]
The Souls Grown Deep Foundation is helping museums integrate art by self-taught African American artists from the South into their collections. The foundation was established by art historian William Arnett and his sons, and once they have dispersed their own collection to institutions, will focus on education and other artist support initiatives. [The Art Newspaper]
Chinese artist and political dissident Ai Weiwei, in collaboration with architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron has an installation up at the Park Armory that uses infrared recordings, face recognition software, and a small fleet of hovering drones. It sounds creepy. [New York Daily News]
Katie Hollander resigns from her position as Executive Director at Creative Time after only one year in the position. We can’t say we’re surprised. Hollander is a contentious figure in the non-profit world and her leadership style has often quietly raised eyebrows. [artnet News]
Diane Bronstein, “GRAB THIS!”. Part of the NASTY WOMEN Exhibition at the Knockdown Center.
A statue of imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier is being removed from American University’s campus following threats. According to the artist, who goes by the name Rigo 23, “What the director of the art center told me is the Fox News item unleashed the crazies, and the crazies are threatening the university.” [WUSA 9]
John Berger, the famed scholar and author the book and BBC series Ways of Seeing is dead. Our obituary will go up later today but in the meantime Adrian Searle, who knew Berger personally, has you covered. [The Guardian]
The Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum reflects on his time at Standing Rock, with an honest (and often funny) account of that “what should I be doing?” feeling so many people are going through. [Hyperallergic]
10 bucks for a 2017 calendar from our favorite designer, Phillip Niemeyer, at Northern Southern. Get one. [Northern Southern]
In politics, late last night, the GOP secretly voted to eviscerate the independent ethics committee established in 2008 after the party became mired in abuse and bribes. Even Fox News reported on this thoroughly and without their usual spin (though the news was deemed the second most important story of the evening next to the weather last night and is now below the fold). [The New York Times]
A large text sculpture by Ahmet Güneştekin has been censored in Turkey after eliciting protests. The piece “Kostantiniyye” is just a series of block letters spelling out Istanbul’s former name, which the city was called from 1453 to 1930. Why people are so upset over this is a bit confusing to me. [artnet News]
Wow. According to the MTA, every underground subway station in New York City now has wifi. And AFC staffers can confirm that their routes now all include wifi. Finally some good news to kick of 2017. [Gothamist]
In protest of Trump, and in support of Planned Parenthood, female artists are throwing a NASTY WOMEN Exhibition in Queens. The show will feature affordable artwork, and all of the proceeds will go to benefit PP. The show runs from January 12 to 15 at The Knockdown Center. [The Creators Project]
2017 will see another huge private collection opening a museum in LA. The Marciano Art Foundation, funded by a fortune built on GUESS jeans, is renovating a former Masonic Temple into a shrine of contemporary art. Let the conspiracy theories begin. [Los Angeles Times]
Get your Jeff Koons balloon dog sweater. [Forever 21]
First order of business: Hyperallergic redesigned and it looks SO GOOD. The images are huge. The design is simple. It’s easy to read. With this new website, Hyperallergic is clearly the best looking art website out there. (AFC still has them beat, though, in the wallpaper category.) [Hyperallergic]
Good lord, this animated GIF show “Looped Dreams” curated by Rhizome and GIPHY sounds terrible, as reported by Wired. The idea, here, was to show GIFs and their physical counterparts. But Wired reporter Liz Stinson says the physical work all looks better than the GIFs. [Wired]
Kohl’s has donated over 1.5 million to the Milwaukee Art Museum. This was reported by, get this, Fox News. [Fox News]
David Byrne and his collaborator Mala Gaonker have put together a show called “Neurosociety” at Pace Gallery. I don’t get it. Apparently it puts neuroscience to work by testing “our ability to predict elections by judging the competence of faces” and revealing “how our sense of an object’s size depends on our sense of our own size.” Does anyone else understand this? [The New York Times]
Museums are organizing shows for private collectors. It’s amazing how quickly things change. Remember when the New Museum launched “Skin Fruit”, an exhibition showcase Dakis Joannou’s collection and the outrage that followed? It’s hard to imagine that kind of hoo-haw over a show like that now and it’s only six years later. [The Art Newspaper]
A summary of the New York City Hearing on keeping the city affordable to small business. I was there for part of it, and it seemed like there was zero consensus on what do about the problem. Thank-you city council members. Patricia Dorfman, from the Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce has money quote. “It feels as though a great tsunami is coming towards us: big real estate dominating the city. You’re talking about life rafts and water wings when a tsunami is coming.” [Gothamist] Try throwing some paper planes across the world on your mobile phone. [paperplanes.world]
Jack Shainman has hung Dread Scott’s “A MAN WAS LYNCHED BY POLICE YESTERDAY” flag above the gallery, referencing the iconic Jim Crow era NAACP flag. Predictably, our colleagues over at Fox News find this controversial and insensitive following the mass shooting in Dallas in which five police officers were killed. Because in conservative logic, the deaths of five police officers somehow outweigh the roughly 100 unarmed black people killed annually by police? [Fox News]
Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Downtown Brooklyn Arts Alliance have presented the “Culture Forward” plan to retain and expand the neighborhood’s art scene in the face of large-scale developments. Most excitingly, they’re advocating that the city-owned properties at 31 Lafayette Avenue and 334 Furman Street be renovated into 30,000 square feet of artist studios and are offering affordable housing seminars for arts/culture workers. [Curbed]
Mark Hudson doesn’t seem to be a fan of the Liverpool Biennial. His chief complaint seems to be that the future of art looks a lot like the 1980s, but the whole curatorial concept of “episodes” sounds bizarre and hokey. Has anyone else seen the show? Sound off in the comments, please. We’re curious. [The Telegraph]
A French court has indicted dealer Olivier Thomas over charges he participated in the theft and sale of three Picasso paintings from the artist’s stepdaughter Catherine Hutin-Blay. The paintings were discovered at the home of Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who purchased them for €27 million from the Swiss businessman Yves Bouvier, who has been accused and fined for harboring the stolen paintings. Juicy. [artnet News]
And in a far more bizarre case of international art legal troubles: a Canadian corrections officer, Robert Fletcher, is suing Scottish artist Peter Doig for $5 million because he won’t admit to painting a landscape painting in Fletcher’s possession. According to Fletcher, Doig was arrested for LSD possession as a teenager in Canada in the 1970s and sold the painting (which could now be worth a hefty sum) to the corrections officer when on parole for $100. The plot thickens, as there’s also a now-deceased Canadian with a similar name whose circumstances also fit the narrative. [Daily Mail]
This is disgusting and also kind of cool: Central Saint Martins student Tina Gorjanc has filed a patent to clone human leather from Alexander McQueen’s DNA to produce a line of leather goods. I guess that human leather “Perfecto” jacket would be cyberpunk as fuck. [Dezeen]
What were the top five most scandalous stories we covered this year? The ones people read, shared, and re-tweeted the most, of course. I delved into our site stats to ask why we love bad news so much.
Last week, FOX News personality Jesse Watters visited Art Basel Miami Beach to troll the art world. The segment aired last night, after heavy redaction and blooper clips being used as filler. This is how I remember our conversation transpiring.
Bjarke Ingles Group has just unveiled plans for WTC Tower 2, a huge departure from the slightly yawn-inducing Norman Foster proposal. Since this thing is going to forever change the Manhattan skyline, we’re weighing in on the new design, which will be the new home of Fox News, among other tenants.
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