Jho Low

October 20, 2016

Surprise, surprise. Ryder Ripps, the artist known for his Donald Trump-like vacuous chest thumping and misogynistic paintings was interviewed last night as a Donald Trump supporter. His biggest concern? The wall between Mexico and the US. “I just hope they build it high enough,” he said. “Because people climb walls.” The artist then updated his Facebook to brag about duping a reporter into believing he was a Trump supporter when he actually supports Bernie Sanders. [The Guardian]

Dezeen is a blog we enjoy for many reasons, including their weekly round up of notoriously snarky reader comments. This one might just take the cake. Responding to a reverse-vaulted pizzeria interior, reader TFO remarked “I feel violated. Cis male architecture sitting on my face.” Architecture criticism is starting to look a lot like art criticism. [Dezeen]

Thinking of funding your brilliant project through Kickstarter? Maybe reconsider… factories in China are ripping off design ideas from the internet before they even hit their own production start. [Quartz]

So, that naked statue of Donald Trump mostly elicited plenty of laughs (and one high-profile theft) but when a similar sculpture of nude Hillary Clinton was erected in Downtown Manhattan this week it caused a minor violent street brawl. A National Museum of the American Indian employee (identified only as “Nancy”) toppled the sculpture by Anthony Scioli (maybe?) and enacted a pretty comical tug-of-war with the artist that ended with Nancy sitting on top of it. Of all the borderline hilarious/cringe-worthy confrontations this trainwreck of an election has stoked, this art fight is probably the most of both. [New York Daily News]

Bethany “Sick Din” Dinsick is seeking music videos from artists for a screening at Bushwick’s Otion Front Studios on November 1st. Email her submissions at bdinsick@gmail.com. [Facebook]

Can anyone else figure out James Bridle’s “Cloud Index”? The artwork/website maps cloud patterns to potential outcomes of the Brexit vote, and talks about cloud seeding as a form of propaganda, as well as cloud computing. It’s a really pretty website, but what exactly is the relationship between the clouds and the vote? It brings Spurious Correlations to mind. [Serpentine Gallery]

Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde’s smog-eating mini-tower has come to Beijing. In tests in Rotterdam, it sucked about 60% of pollutants from a small area, which were then made into jewelry. In far more polluted Beijing, however, data on its effectiveness won’t be made public. [Forbes] According to Chinese press, the tower (which is installed in the capital’s 798 arts district) hasn’t really impressed locals. [ECNS]

Carolina Miranda reports on why memes have greater currency this election than artwork. [Culture: High & Low]

Amid investigations of corruption and money laundering, the US Justice Department has seized some pretty valuable paintings from Jho Low, an aide to the Malaysian Prime Minister. Now art dealer David Nahmad, of Monaco, is claiming a Monet in the collection actually belongs to him. Although he attempted to sell the painting to Low, and received a $2 million wire transfer, he reports that the deal fell through. This story ought to get juicier as it develops. [International Business Times]

Turns out there’s lots of poisonous heavy metals in paint. Not exactly a surprise, and the writer doesn’t seem to understand that while cobalt blue is more expensive and toxic than its cheaper cousin french ultramarine blue, there are actual differences in the color. It’s useful, though, because it does offer examples of colors made with heavy metals and their knockoffs. [The Observer]

Read the full article →

May 20, 2016

Keiichi Matsuda [h/t Gizmodo]

In order to get their AI to speak less like a robot, Google force-fed it thousands of romance novels and created a new language game to teach the bot to create paragraphs out of two statements. What resulted is some weird, lonely poetry. Someone get this thing a drink. [Android Authority]

In other “why would humanity even want this technology?” news, Keiichi Matsuda follows the burgeoning field of “augmented reality” to its logical conclusion: an annoying world full of pop-up ads and invasive game-like marketing. [Gizmodo]

The British Museum closed yesterday after Greenpeace activists climbed the columns on the museum’s facade and unfurled banners advertising a fake “Sunken Cities” exhibition about the effects of climate change, listing locations such as New Orleans. The demonstration was in protest of oil company BP’s funding of the museum, which many claim has impacted the way museums discuss climate change and other environmental issues. [artnet News]

Joan Miró’s grandson, Joan Punyet Miró, auctioned off 28 works by the artist to raise nearly $70,000 for refugees yesterday. The elder Miró, like many Spanish artists of the era, was himself a refugee during the Spanish Civil war. [Hyperallergic]

Be still our hearts: Betty Tompkins and Marilyn Minter discuss being a woman in art school in the 70’s, dive bars, and how damn long it took to achieve “success” in the art world. [Blouin Artinfo]

Whoa. Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed a process to turn wood transparent. The article discusses the obvious implications for architecture, but this could be the next big material for sculptors. [The New York Times]

Here’s an article arguing that cities should stop investing in museums and champion music festivals instead. According to writer Jonathan Wynn, they are preferable because they are cheaper, adaptable and require less public funding. [The Conversation]

People love to talk about how the CIA boosted the careers of abstract expressionists, but the CIA’s own art collection is ironically a tad closer to Soviet Realism, in that it depicts the glorious (and often secretive) fruits of its own workforce’s labors. Lots of historical representation here, as well as a cryptic still-life. Is the next big conspiracy theory that the CIA launched the wave of photorealism in 1970’s painting? [NPR]

Novelist Helen DeWitt does Frieze Magazine’s Questionnaire. This isn’t our cup of tea—it’s too self-promote-y and pompous—but we’ve seen it get a few high fives over twitter regardless. You be the judge. [Frieze]

Art collector Jho Low is being investigated by the FBI for shady dealings with Malaysian financial corruption. This has led to Low liquidating assets such as shares in a Manhattan hotel and his Basquiat painting, which he sold at a nearly $14 million loss to another finance douchebag. Does anyone else have news fatigue from trying to figure out exactly what the illegal/unethical, convoluted thing crooked investment people did when reading about the art market? [The Wall Street Journal]

Read the full article →