Daniel Knorr, Expiration Movement, (2017). Fridericianum Kassel. Photo © Bernd Borchardt, Courtesy Galerie nächst St. Stephan
- “They go for the artists first. They go for the journalists, writers, painters, and photographers. That’s who you lock up if you don’t want people to know what’s happening. So that’s why I think if we don’t protect what they’re making now, it is a slippery slope, and we will lose by the time we need these images to go to the general public. No matter what these artists are working on now, whether or not it has an overt political sensibility, we need to protect them and their freedom.” Deana Haggag, the new president of United States Artists, on the arts in Trump’s America. [Vogue]
- Dizzy is a new print-only art magazine that features everything from profiles of artists’ cats to an advice column by Princess Nokia. [ARTnews]
- Man, The Hard Times (The Onion’s more punk cousin) has been killing it lately. This headline is everything: “Trump to Begin Series of Dumpster Fireside Chats”. [The Hard Times]
- What is going on with LACMA’s expansion plans? When first announced, it seemed like architect Peter Zumthor was going to stitch together to museum’s existing campus with an elevated blob building that spanned busy Wilshire Ave and created connections above the various buildings. It turns out they want to demolish most of those buildings, which begs the question: why do you need a weird bridge building if the facilities it’s bridging are gone? The blob shape was explained as a reference to the La Brea tar pits, and the building was going to be clad in glossy black to match. But now they’ve ditched that idea, and even the interiors are supposed to be Real-Housewives-bathroom-beige. It seems like a lot of the conceptual justifications for this design just don’t make sense anymore, and this has been whittled into an odd-but-boring building. [Dezeen]
- Daniel Knorr’s piece for documenta 14 comprises a smoke machine installed in Kassel’s Fridericianum museum. It spews white smoke from the museum’s tower (a reference to the Pope dying/Vatican electoral process? Does the art world need a new Pope?) and this has caused alarm. City residents keep calling the fire department because it looks like the museum is on fire. The fire department has gotten tired of repeatedly checking on the installation to reassure everyone that it isn’t a fire, so now documenta will be providing a full-time smoke-watcher to reassure all involved that it’s just art and not a disaster. How did no one anticipate this being an issue in the planning process? [artnet News]
- The Bell Foundry, an artist-run live-work-show space that was shuttered by the Baltimore Fire Department following the Ghost Ship fire, is for sale. The idiosyncratic building and adjacent lot are being marketed as a knock-down development site—suggesting that the owners have given up on trying to get the building up to code and, given its $1 million price tag, will likely never be art space again. This sucks, and also comes amidst a city-wide debate over the future of artist-run spaces. The mayor has pledged to help preserve and bring-up-to-code the city’s quasi-legal art spaces, but it remains to be seen how that’s going to work. [City Paper]
