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The Spiritual Failure of Tony Oursler’s “Imponderable”

by Rhett Jones on July 22, 2016

Is there a secret, intertwined history that ties together mass media, spiritualist con artists, pulp fiction and the unreliability of the image? Tony Oursler’s “Imponderable” would like you to think so. The multimedia artist’s latest work (on at MoMA through January 8th, 2017) is a 90-minute immersive video experience that attempts to draw connections between all of those topics as well as his own familial autobiography and other threads that relate to his collection of spiritualist memorabilia. Unfortunately, when the work seems to come close to solidifying a thematic relationship between the various subjects on its mind, it tends to feel a bit like a magician clumsily employing misdirection. The audience sees a hat, a beautiful assistant and a rabbit up the sleeve, but no magic.

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How To Turn a Museum Into An Arcade

by Rhett Jones on July 7, 2016

Now that our culture has crossed the hurdle of recognizing that video games are more than just a time-wasting triviality that rots your brain, institutions have to grapple with how to preserve and present the rapidly forming canon. The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens was the first museum to collect video games and its currently showing off some prime gems in the exhibition, “Arcade Classics: Video Games from the Collection.” (on through October 23rd)

Art F City sat down with the museum’s Curator of Digital Media, Jason Eppink, to discuss the difficulties of preservation, how VR may become the new social medium and exactly why Duchamp was such a dedicated gamer.

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Friday Links: A Good Day For LGBT Rights

by Rhett Jones on July 1, 2016

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The Pentagon has announced that the ban on transgender citizens serving in the military will be lifted. What’s more, transgender recruits will receive full coverage of medical expenses, including hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery if a doctor determines the procedures to be medically necessary. [CNN]
Two planned buildings in New York’s affordable housing program will be making specific efforts to be more LGBT-friendly. The buildings are aimed to provide housing for low-income, elderly New Yorkers. Programming will include Pride Month celebrations and events that highlight LGBT artists and writers. The initiative is designed to make people in the community feel safer when applying for senior services. [Curbed]
Candy Coleman, the director of Gagosian Gallery’s Los Angeles location has resigned and will be joining Sotheby’s. Her role will be to increase the auction giants west coast operations. [ArtNews]
After 176 years in business, the world’s oldest photography studio is shutting down. Bourne & Shepherd, in Koltaka, India, opened sometime around 1840. Reports say that business has slowly been in decline after a fire destroyed significant portions of their archives, 25 years ago. [artnet News]
Australia has been experiencing severe funding cuts to their national arts program. In addition to 50% small to medium arts organizations being left without funding, 1,300 arts workers are expected to lose their jobs. The Guardian has an insider account of the activist campaign to raise awareness and make this an election issue. [The Guardian]
Tesla has announced that a man died while using the company’s autopilot feature. He is the first known casualty and unfortunately it may be the electric automaker’s fault. Maybe slow down hopes for those driverless cars coming sooner rather than later. [Forbes]
Roberta likes MoMA’s new Bruce Conner retrospective. This thing sounds massive, it features 250 works including Conner’s drawings and assemblages. We’re looking forward to this one. [New York Times]

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Thursday Links: Make It So

by Paddy Johnson and Rea McNamara on June 16, 2016

Artnews SA, the Polish Company that briefly owned ARTnews and Art in America, has filed for bankruptcy and will be liquidating all its assets. The bankruptcy was filed just two weeks after Peter Brant assumed all the assets for both publications, and announced that Brant Publications has become their legal owner. [artnet News]
“‘The Present in Drag’ errs by so uniformly investing in the corporate gaze that any radical vision of emancipation from this aesthetic comes off as puritanical. Consumer options are tragically offered as real options. How do we reconcile this corporate violence — which reduces our bodies, wants and needs to data with such cruel effect — with its embodiment by artists, however self-aware?” Karen Archey reviews DIS’s curation of the Berlin Biennale. [Frieze]
Anti-ISIS hacktivists have hit the Internet Archive. The open-access digital library and host of the WayBack Machine were hit with a DDoS attack yesterday because they inadvertently host user-uploaded ISIS propaganda materials. [Motherboard]
Brazilian artist Vik Muniz has a show at Mauritshuis in The Hague showcasing life-sized models of the flip-sides of famous paintings. Expectedly, the details are mundane — ”Mona Lisa” has a written message that says “this way up”, while Matisse’s “Red Studio” is covered in chicken wire. “The back reflects the artist’s studio, it has nails, it has hardware and is always changing. It shows the museum’s role as conservator, too,” says Muniz. [Guardian]
A long-list Gauguin floral still life has been rediscovered in a Connecticut auction house. [Art Newspaper]
Half of the Corcoran art school’s full-time faculty were laid off last month. To put in perspective, out of 19 full-time faculty, only 9 are coming back in the fall.The loss coincides with the school’s class of 2016 graduation ceremony, but also comes at a time of budget cuts, a shrinking student body, and the school’s integration into George Washington University. The latter has become a growing concern for the historical art school’s community, who have felt that the ongoing merger has had a lack of transparency in its proceedings. [Hyperallergic]
Diana Y. Chou has been hired by the San Diego Museum of Art as its new associate curator of East Asian art. Chou has organized museum shows in the United States and Taiwan for the past 15 years, and consulted with the Carnegie when it was reinstalling its Asian art galleries. At the San Diego Museum, she’ll be overseeing a collection containing 7,000 works, organizing shows and being involved with its acquisitions. [Artforum]
Former MoMA film curator Lawrence Kardish weighs in on the institution’s controversial firing of long-time assistant curator of film Sally Berger: “I no longer understand what goes on in my old stomping grounds… Doesn’t a curator have the right to pick and choose what is to be shown under his/her auspices?” Berger’s firing last week was tied with the wrongful cancellation of “Under the Sun”, a documentary about North Korea from February’s Doc Fortnight festival. [Indiewire]
We’ve been looking forward to this all year: it’s Captain Picard Day, so here’s all the Earl Grey recipes you ever needed. [Nerdist]

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This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Old School Survival

by Paddy Johnson and Rea McNamara on June 6, 2016

Urban survival, whether it’s the cost of living in New York or even riding along Sag Habour in a self-sustaining houseboat, looms largely in this week’s events. Tonight’s lecture at the Morbid Anatomy Museum suggests that this dates back to Weimar Berlin’s era of anarchy and decadence, where fake fakirs — religious ascetics who live solely on alms — got by with their gnarly nails and pins piercing. Flash forward to Saturday’s MoMA opening of Nan Goldin’s famous 1986 visual diary “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, and those piercings became the battle scars of surviving the East Village’s punk bohemia. Today, we’re thankfully more practical in eking out our incomes: we look to the sun and its instruments (see this Thursday’s opening of the “Heliotropes” group show at Geary Contemporary) or envision terrible futures in our analogue pasts (“that old school dystopia” at Theodore:Art on Friday). But sustainability, if we quickly cut to the chase, really involves supporting each other, which is why this weekend’s workshops around the nuts and bolts of artist finances or even writing and editing an artist statement will get you ahead. No need for any physical scars.

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This Week’s Must See Events: So Many Open Studios

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on April 26, 2016

Okay, this map above might be hard to read at this size (big one here), but it gives you an idea of the scale of Greenpoint Open Studios, which runs this weekend and will feature hundreds of artists. That kicks off tonight (Tuesday) with a meet-and-greet happy hour at Le Fanfare. Before that starts, head to Hauser & Wirth for a retrospective of midcentury painter Philip Guston. Wednesday, laugh (or maybe be scared) with Nao Bustamante at MoMA. Thursday, there’s a solo show of Anthony Cudahy’s funeral-inspired paintings at Mumbo’s Outfit in Geary Contemporary and a group show that positions artworks as set pieces at 99¢ Plus in Brooklyn.

The weekend begins with yet more open studios at SVA’s MFA program, followed by the IRL reception and performances for AC Institute’s current online exhibition. More online/offline fun is to be had late night in MoMA’s lobby, where social media artist/rapper Yung Jake presents a multimedia art and music experience that sounds like it will be quite the party. If you’re not too hungover, head to Greenpoint Open Studios on Saturday, followed by a bizarre-sounding Yale MFA show at the Abrons Art Center and a Xiu Xiu performance of music from Twin Peaks at the Kitchen. In a week of “must-see” events, that stands out as a can’t miss. Sunday, Michael Mahalchick’s solo show at CANADA promises to be weird and wonderful, and Greenpoint Open Studios wraps up with yet another party. Wear layers—the weather, like so much art, is going to be unpredictable while you’re trudging around North Brooklyn.

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Tuesday Links: Artist’s Jesus Dartboard Causes Predictable Furor

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on April 26, 2016

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Rutgers University Libraries caused a controversy with the display of “Vitruvian Man” by an anonymous student or faculty member. The piece is one of the Jesus figurines from a crucifix attached to a dart board. After the image went viral on the conservative internet, the library removed it and issued an apology. [The Blaze]

Phil America installed the guerilla art exhibition The Perilous Fight in the abandoned Nevins Street subway station. The MTA hasn’t sanctioned the installation and hasn’t issued a statement, but it’s unlikely the show will remain there. The work comprises a series of flags America made in tribute to victims of gun violence. [Gothamist]

Someone found a demo tape of early HD video technology from 1993. It’s pretty incredible, because it looks more or less like it was shot yesterday. With the exception of the twin towers and older taxis, this could be from someone’s iPhone 6. Chris Plante muses on the strangeness of seeing the past through the lens of contemporary technology. There’s an entire generation for whom nostalgia won’t be characterized by grainy film, choppy video, or Polaroids. [The Verge]

Larry Gagosian is on the cover of the Wall Street Journal Magazine this week, and the story of his art world ascent is surprisingly compelling. How did Gagosian go from being a Los Angeles parking lot manager to someone who owns a private jet and a globe-spanning chain of galleries? Leo Castelli’s mentorship, for starters. [The Wall Street Journal]

MoMA’s architecture and design galleries will not be demolished in the new renovation. They closed the galleries as part of the construction process in their new expanded space next door, prompting speculation that those galleries would be sacrificed to the reno gods. No such luck. [Curbed New York]

Does the Babacar M’Bow/MoCA North Miami drama never cease? The former museum director is now suing the city of North Miami for wrongful termination after he was dismissed for sexual harassment claims. [artnet News]

Auction house competition is so cut-throat that their commissions have plummeted more than 50 percent since 2009. There is now a term called “enhanced hammer”, which refers to what happens when an auction house offers between 4-7 percent of the buyer’s premium on top of the sale price. Then there’s price guarantees too. Definitely still a seller’s market for those of us who have a bunch of high end art we want to sell (hedge fund managers!). [Bloomberg]

It seems as if there’s a “but is fashion art?” article every time a museum opens a garment-centric exhibition. Now, we’ve got Isaac Mizrahi at the Jewish Museum and Manus x Machina: Fashion in the Age of Technology opening at The Met next month. The latter sounds like it’s going to be pretty interesting. There’s also the new film “The First Monday in May”, which chronicles the curation of last year’s blockbuster China Through the Looking Glass and the equally considered Met Gala. Does fashion belong in a museum? As long as it rakes in these levels of attendance and funding, that question answers itself. [The Washington Post]

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Friday Links: A Year of Heavy Musician Casualties

by Paddy Johnson and Rea McNamara on April 22, 2016

Prince

The Guggenheim just went public with its new website. Gone is the top navigation bar, and the cluttered four column information architecture. The navigation has shifted to a static top left box that floats as you scroll through the content. An improvement, I guess, but now it looks like a Martha Stewart website circa 2009. Too much teal. [Guggenheim]
“Stay Purple.” Yesterday’s unexpected death of Prince saw its share of tributes, like Prince St station suddenly getting a P line, and Minneapolis’s First Avenue hosting an all-night street dance party in honor of the purple one. It’s been great seeing previous tributes — like Questlove discussing why Prince was hip hop, or Hilton Als on his black queer sexuality — get re-discovered. [The Internet]
And in other tragic deaths, Richard Lyons, the founder of Negativland died at 57. Cancer sucks. [Rolling Stone]
Damien Hirst is back with Gagosian. [New York Times]
When I was visiting Lisbon last fall, I was blown away by the opulence and kitsch of its palaces — specifically, the Palácio da Pena, this insane mock-Manueline Disneyland former summer residence of the Portuguese royal family. So it’s cool to see documentation of the Lisbon-based art and architecture collective Os Espacialistas’s intervention at the Marquis of Pombal Palace in Oeiras. [Hyperallergic]
Why is it, that whenever we read about a museum increasing their focus on contemporary art, it involves the purchase of a new building? You’d think the two were inextricably linked, when in fact, these projects are not always needed. Keep that in mind when reading “A Story of Two Worlds: Flush MoMA, Struggling Met”. The Met has plenty of amazing space to play around with—they didn’t need to the Breuer building to achieve that. [The New York Times]
This year New Yorkers will spend two thirds of their income on rent. The Manhattan market, though, is softening. [Curbed]

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This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Grad School, Reading and Weeding

by Michael Anthony Farley and Rea McNamara on April 18, 2016

Get ready for a week of “higher” education. Wednesday is 4/20, and American Medium has a night of corporate-retreat stoner comedy to celebrate. Art journal Packet Bi-Weekly‘s is also marking the occasion with a special “Hi-Weekly” issue. But if you’re looking for some non-weed-themed intellectual pursuits, come see our own Paddy Johnson speak at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City on Thursday or grab the latest issue of n+1 at their Friday night launch party at SIGNAL. MFA thesis exhibitions are in full swing, with programming and openings from ICP Bard, SVA’s curatorial practice MA, and Columbia on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, respectively.

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