Posts tagged as:

jerry saltz

Thursday Links: Can’t Wait to Put the Armory Show Behind Us

by Michael Anthony Farley and Rea McNamara on February 11, 2016

Image via the New York Times

Charlie is a 1 year old kangaroo currently serving as resident therapy animal at Utah’s William E. Christoffersen Veterans Home. He hops around and gives hugs to the veterans and their families. (Related: What Does a Parrot Know about PTSD) If you’re feeling down, the #therapyanimal hashtag on Twitter should cheer you up. [The Dodo]

Just in case we were starting to get bored with the whole Scumbag-Martin-Shkreli-Bought-the-Wu-Tang-Clan-Album drama, the plot thickens. Now everyone tangentially related to the album’s creation and ownership are being sued by fan-artist Jason Koza over copyright infringement. Koza refers to himself as “one of the most talented portrait artists of the Second Millennium [sic]”. All parties involved are expected to arrive in court in a clown car. [artnet News]

“I dig the dopey, doglike look on the swimmer’s face too. It hints at something deeper or more embarrassed. He looks like the kind of straight cute lunkheads in high school who’d let you blow them, you know?” Brandon Soderberg on “Flaming American (Swim Champ)” By Marsden Hartley. [City Paper]

Neoliberal Lulz is the latest project from London-based Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc. The artist now identifies as a corporation, and is selling her personal data—everything from the stuff collected and monetized by Google and Facebook to the information hackers might steal. [The Guardian]

Long Island City artists are facing the threat of displacement. A dance company had to renegotiate a 70% rent hike to a 40% increase. Following LIC’s 2001 rezoning which led to 35,000 new residents in the area, it appears independent companies are being forced to relocate in order to make way for luxury condos. [LIC Post]

And what’s heading to LIC? Lots of skyscrapers. There’s currently a race to build Queens’ new tallest building. [Curbed]

On the emergence of Amish romance novels, and its booming rural, religious mom readership. [The Paris Review]

Art museum social media producers are really emerging as the new power players, as attested by this recent profile on the MET’s Kimberly Drew. I [Rea] love how Drew’s favourite hashtags are #BlackLivesMatter, #CaughtGrammin and #arthoe. [NBC News]

“It’s probably the first and last time a magazine has used a Gramsci quotation to introduce its readers to Ice Cube.” This is so amazing: in 1991, Angela Davis interviewed Ice Cube for Transition Magazine. [Dangerous Minds]

Fascinating video portrait of Zun Lee. The Toronto-based documentarian and photographer co-curated Fade to Resistance, an exhibition currently on at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel of found Polaroid of African-American families from the 1970s and 1980s. [Format Magazine]

Curator Marta Kuzma has been named dean of the Yale School of Art. She’s the first woman to hold the position. [Yale News]

Here’s a slideshow of previously unseen Picasso works. In total, 271 unknown Picassos were unveiled by a retired French electrician who once worked for the artist and had a secret stash of his work in his garage. [The Telegraph]

Eyeroll highlights from the Armory Show talks includes Blake Gopnik discussing his forthcoming Warhol biography with Warhol Museum director Eric Shiner, and Jerry Saltz engaging in a deathmatch with Armory director Ben Genocchio on “visual criticism in the digital age”. [The Observer]

Cindy Sherman is on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, part of a photoshoot where the artist poses as the type of groupies one might see outside of NYFW waiting to be documented by street fashion photographers. I hate to love this, but it’s really the most Cindy Sherman thing to do with a fashion mag. [Harper’s Bazaar]

We wrote about the malware museum on Tuesday, but the Internet Archive has far more than just this available thanks to its 3.1 emulator software. Here is a collection of curated Windows 3.x software that shows the range of software products available in the early 1990s. Does anyone else think Castle of the Winds and Net Hack are remarkably similar? [Internet Archive]

Read the full article →

Thursday Links: How Brooklyn Salad Helped Settle A City

by Paddy Johnson Michael Anthony Farley Rea McNamara on January 28, 2016

kale

James Rondeau has been appoint the new President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago. Rondeau will assume his new title and duties at the Board of Trustees meeting on February 16, 2016. [AFC Inbox]
Mexican women fed up with cat calls and harassers are fighting back with plastic confetti guns and punk rock music. [AJ+]
Art critic Jerry Saltz has published his endorsement of Hillary Clinton and has dubbed it, “Hilary Clinton,Why I Am Voting for Hillary Clinton; The Smell of Napalm the Morning of November 9, 2016”. The reference to Apocalypse Now and nuclear bombs has offended some, though, who deem the violent reference reprehensible but also sanitized because he calls himself a feminist in the endorsement. Now, Saltz has received dozens of “community standard violation complains”. Good God, people. Get a grip. Let a metaphor be a metaphor. [Facebook]
Coyotes, possibly high on magic mushrooms, attack cars near Stinson Beach. [SFist]
“Settlers of Brooklyn” (pronounced Brook-lawn) is new commercial spoofing the board game “Settlers of Catan”. The goal is to be the first to fully gentrify a neighborhood with used record stores, food trucks and Urban Outfitters. In the land of Brooklyn, there are five resources available: Coffee, bicycles, vinyl, skinny jeans and kale. OMG, I so want this game to exist. [Facebook]
What does selfie culture tell us about difference between Chinese and American beauty standards. The conclusions seems to be that Americans like big butts. [Yahoo]
An enormous piece on women and gender politics in the food world. If you have a few hours, this piece is for you. [Edible]
David Zwirner is looking to expand to Hong Kong. [artnet News]
Interesting: Stephen Jost will replace Matthew Teitelbaum as the director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Previously, Jost ran the Honolulu Museum of Art, a low profile position relative to the AGO, but had done exceedingly well in the position by stabalizing and growing the museum’s finances. Teitelbaum was the director for 17 years, and oversaw a $276-million renovation designed by Frank Gehry, so Jost will have some big shoes to fill. [The Globe and Mail]

Read the full article →

This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Save Yourself for the Weekend

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on January 25, 2016

This might seem like a slow week of screenings and talks, but it’s probably best to save your energy for the weekend anyway. There is a lot to do.

Read the full article →

Should I Get An MFA? The 2016 Edition

by Rea McNamara on January 21, 2016

Back in 2011 AFC asked the question, “Should I get an MFA?” At the time we leaned towards “No”. There were a number of reasons cited, the most pressing being that we believed it was too expensive and most artists could get the equivalent experience in the real world.

Five years later, has much changed?

Read the full article →

Thursday Links: AFC Critic Deemed More Powerful Than Bernie Sanders

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]

Read the full article →

Tuesday Links: Even Animals Are Pissed-Off About Gentrification

by Michael Anthony Farley and Rea McNamara on September 29, 2015

[jwplayer mediaid=”74886″]

I’m not sure exactly what this awesome creature is (a goat?) but I do know how he feels. [Facebook]

Gentrification tensions in Bushwick have been running at a seemingly all-time high after neighborhood newcomer London Kaye and Bushwick Flea owner Rob Abner installed a pretty heinous crochet mural inspired by Wes Anderson on a longtime resident’s home without her permission. This Saturday, the anarchist group Brooklyn Solidarity Network staged an anti-gentrification protest at the market, which led to one very-illegal sounding fake arrest by NYPD Officer Bin-Safar. [Gothamist]

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, British anarchist group Class War has been organizing “Fuck Parades” to protest London gentrification. In their latest action, hundreds of masked protesters descended upon a novelty cafe that sells £3.20 (~$5) bowls of breakfast cereal on Brick Lane—once a major center for the city’s working class immigrant communities that has seen huge rent increases. [The Telegraph]

And in a softer approach to confronting gentrification in London, Lucy Sparrow has created Madame Roxy’s Erotic Emporium, a sex shop with all hand-stitched fabric replicas of everything from porn to condom wrappers. The project is a commentary on Soho’s transformation from a “seedy” area to one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the capital. [Dezeen]

This is so well-deserved: LaToya Ruby Frazier and Ta-Nehishi Coates are 2015 MacArthur Fellows. [Artforum]

Amazing: Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation will be housing Frankie Knuckles’s record collection in its Stony Island Arts Bank. [Chicago Reader]

Dia has scrapped plans for a new building in Chelsea. The proposed building, headed by previous director Philippe Vergne, promised to give the Foundation a major presence in New York, and would be situated on the footprint of two of its three existing sites in the city. It was also Vergne’s big banner project, but since moving on to MOCA, has obviously been scuttled by new director Jessica Morgan, who wants to bring “equilibrium” to all of Dia’s spaces. [Art Newspaper]

Leftover bruschetta ham and eggplant tortellini: turns out you can eat pretty gourmet if you dumpster dive in the Upper West side. [VICE]

Jerry Saltz weighs in on Dana Schutz and Katherine Bernhardt, and the frustratingly protracted careers of female bad-boy painters. [New York Magazine]

Listen to this interview with Simon Denny, the Berlin-based artist who used leaked NSA PowerPoint presentations for the installation “Secret Power,” New Zealand’s Venice Biennale Pavilion. He also used Behance to track down David Darchicourt, the former NSA creative director of defense intelligence. He commissioned the graphic designer to the spies to create maps of Denny’s native New Zealand. So smart. [Marketplace]

Lydia Cash, a painter who participated in last weekend’s Edgewater Fall Art Fair, had a large number of her paintings stolen. But she left her tent completely open and had her paintings still in view. According to the organizer’s statement, “she had done the same when she participated in our Art Fair last year.” As much as I want to have one tear streaming down my face for Cash’s plight, I think I agree with one of the story’s commenters: “don’t feel sorry for her — she left her stuff in an open tent.” [NBC Chicago]

The Moscow Biennial faces a double whammy of a devalued Ruble and a political climate that’s not particularly friendly to contemporary art. This year’s curators Bart de Baere, Dafne Ayas, and Nicolaus Schafhausen used their shoestring budget to trim any excesses designed to cater to the market—no shipping of huge expensive artworks, for example—and focused on providing space for artists to produce new work, showing easier-to-insure photographs, and hosting small-scale interactive performances. [artnet News]

In other Moscow news, the nonprofit art space Red Square Gallery has closed following police intimidation over an exhibition of photographs of LGBT teenagers. [The Art Newspaper]

Read the full article →

Thursday Links: Sucker Schools

by Paddy Johnson on September 24, 2015

Casey and Rowdy horse training, 71 Ranch. Deeth Nev. 2012. Lucas Foglia, Courtesy of Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York (originally via Lens Blog)

More negative press for the University of Southern California. Earlier this year, the entire first year class MFA class dropped out of the program, citing an array of broken promises by the school’s administration. Now, the unofficial blog they set up in protest has been taken down the school’s administration. The administration has a problem with the URL, uscmfa.tumblr.com, which they claim looks like an official blog of the school. The students have set up another blog under a slightly different address that thus far has not been removed. [Hyperallergic]
Kara Walker has left her position at Columbia for Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. What a coup. [ARTnews]
A Matthew Barney profile in which we get to learn about just how icky his art has become. [The New York Times]
Larry Pitman’s new paintings are displayed inside a tiny box in Culver City. [Culture: High & Low]
Jerry Saltz hands four female painters positive three sentence reviews. They are very long sentences. Alicia McCarthy, Jackie Saccoccio, Keltie Ferris, and Betty Tompkins will be very happy right now. [Vulture]
We don’t normally link to profiles of collectors, but Nancy & David Frej’s collection is so thoughtfully put together, this one deserves a nod. [THE SEEN]
Yogi Berra, famed Yankees catcher died yesterday at the age of 90. He’s the guy who once said, “It’s ain’t over til it’s over”. Or did he? Here’s a list of properly and misattributed quotes by the baseball player. [The New York Times]

Read the full article →

Friday Links: Museum Poo on a Slide

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on August 28, 2015

sad-goth

Miley Cyrus will be collaborating with underground net artists and artist Jen Stark for the VMA’s this year, which she will host. Prediction: Jerry Saltz will write a think piece lauding whatever she does. Anyway, here’s an interview she gave to the Times totally stoned. Read it if you dare. [The New York Times]
Stefan Simchowitz and his dealer/partner Ellis King are suing the 28 year old Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama for deauthenticating nearly 300 signed art works. As Greg Allen tells it, the Simchowitz King position sure is rich. Simchowitz claims he made his career with a Dublin show in 2015. At that point Mahama had two shows at Saatchi, a London residency, participation in DAK’ART, the largest African biennial, an announced show at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, and announced participation in the Venice Biennale, but sure, that Simchowitz show in Dublin made Mahama. Then there’s the art itself. Simchowitz’s 300 works are drawn from a sprawling installation of jute sacks which he purchased for approximately $138,000—he has a history of buying large works and cutting them up to make buckets of money—and he’d already sold 17 of those works for $16,000 each. So, he’s already made close to $450,000, which means the suit is merely a complaint that he didn’t make 20 times his investment. Anyway, Allen suggests that Mahama flood the market with these things and devalue the work entirely. Haha! [Greg Allen]
North Korea’s new airport in Pyongyang has all the latest technology, including an Internet room…with no Internet. It seems the room exists primarily to create the illusion of a modern airport, as the country itself allows its citizens virtually no access to the web. [Associated Press]
Why are paintings of the baby Jesus usually so creepy? Maura Callahan investigates, and highlights some especially terrifying ones in the Walters Art Museum’s collection. [City Paper]
In other “children in museums” news, Osaka students can dress up like poo and navigate a sewage-themed interactive exhibit that features a giant toilet slide. [CCTVNews]
The Times publishes its second piece this week on hydration rumors. The first put to rest the myth that drinking eight cups of water a day was a necessity, the second catalogues a few high school football students who drank too much Gatorade and died. All we need now is a piece about how dehydration has been shown to lower cancer rates and the story loop will be complete. [Well]
New York City’s taxi drivers are getting an Uber-like app to help compete with the rise of popular, more-affordable ridesharing services. [Fortune]
Yes, this is a real headline from the BBC’s health report: “Young goths ‘at risk of depression’”. [BBC News]
A new retrospective of Keith Arnatt’s work sparks old discussions over the art world’s historically cold shoulder to photography as fine art. [The Guardian]
This photo essay looks more like New Orleans than New York, but “Bungalow Brooklyn” is facing many threats from development, sea level rise, and blight. The borough’s historic bungalow districts mostly date from the early 20th century as summer homes. Today, many of the tiny houses are storm damaged, squatted, or vacant as developers sit on them. The upshot? If you’re a crafty aspiring homeowner, they’re probably the only place in the borough where you can buy a home for less than $200,000. [Curbed NY]
The mass exodus of galleries from Chelsea to cheaper digs in the Lower East Side continues. [The Real Deal]

Read the full article →

Tuesday Links: All You Ever Need to Know to Feel Depressed

by Paddy Johnson Michael Anthony Farley Corinna Kirsch on June 30, 2015

Bot poetry

An essay on bots and poetry that is so good. “These days people are writing poems about fucking on volcanoes. ‘We fucked on a volcano.’ How does that help? How does it do anything to solve anything?” [n + 1 via The Paris Review]
The Whitney’s board of trustees has elected a new president, Richard M. DeMartini, and two new co-chairs, Laurie M. Tisch and Neil G. Bluhm. While Tisch has a background in the nonprofit sector—heading her own fund dedicated to increasing access to art education, economic opportunities, and healthy food—DeMartini and Bluhm are both from the world of finance. Bluhm had served as the board’s president since 2008 and is the founder and president of JMB Realty Corporation—a luxury real estate interest that at one point was the largest property developer in the United States. [ARTnews]
More info about the board of trustees, but not from us: “Also militarizing the Baltimore Police Department is Defense Tech ammunitions, sold by Warren Kanders’ Safariland Group. A vice chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s board of trustees, he is a wealthy investor who for the last 20 years has profited from the suppression of civil unrest.” [Al Jazeera America]
Thank you, Karen Archey, for bringing up Jackie Wullschlager’s recent article in the Financial Times. Writing about the Tate’s exhibitions of female modernists like Sonia Delaunay, Barbara Hepworth, and Agnes Martin, Wullschlager concludes: “Yet none delivers the visceral thrill or intellectual charge of a great retrospective, because none of these artists really changed how we see or think. Has a woman artist ever done so? The stories here show that female artists tend to assimilate and adapt radicality pioneered by men.” There is absolutely no way that you can prove that female artists have not changed the way we see or think or that they have assimilated and adapted radicality pioneered by men—scientific principles would be welcome in art history—not to mention that plenty of exhibitions have shown the influence of women in art. We don’t even know where to start, but let’s try Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Sigh. [e-flux conversations]
A pair of paintings featuring the Confederate flag has gone on display at the Laguna Art Museum in Ocean County, California. In reference to the flag’s controversy and the wave of racial unrest sweeping the nation, the artist G. Ray Kerciu said, “I thought as an old man, we would be past all this stuff. But we’re not. It’s a great disappointment to me.” [Los Angeles Times]
While Greece’s economy is in a tailspin, artnet takes the time to notify us that there is absolutely no news about the troubled country’s under-construction Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. [artnet News]
The Great Wall of China is disappearing. By some accounts, almost 30% of the structure has fallen victim to plundering, erosion, and neglect. People are freaking out. [The New York Times]
Hyperallergic’s Robin Grearson reviews Stay in New York, Art F City’s affordable workspace conference, and calls it a “crucial first step.” It’s a great summary for those who missed the conference. [Hyperallergic]
Jerry Saltz explains why everyone should be nicer to gallery attendants…with a picture of Marnie from HBO’s Girls. [Vulture]
WHOA! For the first time ever, the New York Rent Guidelines Board approved a freeze on one-year leases. There’s a couple of caveats to which leases will be affected, but this is historic. [Curbed NY]

Read the full article →

Wednesday Links: Fear of Demon Flats Reaches New Levels

by Paddy Johnson and Corinna Kirsch on May 20, 2015

Art with use value. Our favorite image from the fairs via Jerry Saltz.

Pete Wells, fearful of Texans, but a lover of their fine foods, lavishes glowing words upon the new Tex-Mex restaurant Javelina. “At most restaurants, you are served what you ask for so routinely that your eyes glaze over with boredom. Javelina does not fall into the trap of dull predictability. One night after I left, I realized the guacamole I’d ordered had never arrived; it’s not every restaurant that gives you something to think about on your way home.” [The New York Times]
Trend-spotting: superhero movies exploring 9/11 mythology. [Vox]
New Yorkers will get the opportunity to vote down “ugly” public art thanks to a bill proposed by Jimmy Van Bramer and passed by city council. The bill came in response to outcry over a pink reclining figure by Ohad Meromi proposed for LIC; people were concerned about its color and its 500k+ price tag. And let’s be honest—that thing needs to be voted down. I want to go to the hearing. [DNAInfo]
Los Angeles County officials have raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour! The raise won’t go into effect until 2020. [Los Angeles Times]
Mouthfeel, a food magazine that mixes food reviews and sexy men. [Mouthfeel]
Four percent of Americans are unsure if they own art. This survey, run by YouGov on the subject of the importance of art in daily life also asked how much time participants put into their looks. Ten percent of male respondents answered “none at all.” [Hyperallergic]
Wow. Cara Ober is great. Read this opinion piece about why she opposes Baltimore’s plan to tear down one of Baltimore’s remaining Brutalist structures, McKeldin Fountain in the Inner Harbor. The whole plan is to replace it with a green lawn, extra traffic lanes, and a generic water wall. I have to confess, I can’t stand Brutalist architecture, but it seems no one consulted Baltimore residents when the decision was made to gut the place in 2002. A little more transparency is clearly needed. [Bmore Art]
Women wearing flats are being denied entrance at Cannes. What? [Jezebel]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →

jerry saltz

Get Our Newsletter!

Like Us On Facebook!

Follow Art F City

What is Art F City?