Posts tagged as:

mta

Thursday Links: Let’s Talk About Butter Sculptures

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on July 27, 2017

Photographer Paul Raftery has documented the bizarre architecture of Kazakhstan’s post-Soviet capital Astana. The city looks like a weird low budget sci-fi show’s CGI landscapes brought to life. [Dezeen]
BienalSur, a new biennial organized by the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero of Argentina, launches this Fall with 379 projects scattered across different continents. This biennial format is sort of uncharted waters—Buenos Aires is the hub, but the focus is on South America in general, and projects will take place as far away as Paris and Tokyo. [The Art Newspaper]
The American Alliance of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors have both come out against the Berkshire Museum’s plan to sell 40 artworks to line its endowment and renovate its building. “One of the most fundamental and longstanding principles of the museum field is that a collection is held in the public trust and must not be treated as a disposable financial asset.” [The New York Times]
Ralph Steadman and Ceri Levy got a profile of their collaborations over at VICE. They make cheesy activist drawings of endangered animals, which are relevant because Steadman used to collaborate with Hunter S. Thompson, a well-known journalist and founder of the Gonzo journalism movement. (Thompson’s significance is never explained.) Anyway the drawings look exactly as you’d imagine—contrived splatter, extreme poses, compositions that all sit in the middle of the page. They’re no Walton Ford, that’s for sure. But the author seems to believe that if Steadman played into artist stereotypes more, and was “weirder, hermetic, less astonishingly prolific, and more pretentiously grandiose”, he’d be recognized as one of the truly great artists of our time. Sure. [VICE]
Why is today such a slow art news day? (Yes, we saw the Dana Schutz controversy. Lay off her, already.) I literally just found myself reading this blurb about butter sculptures at the Ohio State Fair, fascinated: “The American Dairy Association Mideast says the sculpture unveiled Tuesday salutes chocolate milk as the official drink of the Ohio High School Athletic Association. It’s the first time the butter sculpture has included color. Cocoa was added for the bottle.” [Seattle Times]
Thank fucking God. The MTA board has pushed back against the authority’s ambitious new rescue plan that would include more fare hikes. The authority’s chief financial officer, Robert E. Foran, pushed for those hikes, but the board thinks the money needs to come from other sources. Andrew Cuomo, the state governor has promised half the funds for the rescue plan, but New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has resisted giving the authority the rest. The mayor needs to man up. [The New York Times]
TRIXI studios has used new ARKit software to develop an augmented reality version of A-Ha’s “Take on Me” video. Is this the future of music videos? [The Verge]

Read the full article →

Wednesday Links: Museum Staff Resign En Masse, Right-Wing Street Artist Trolls LA

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on June 21, 2017

More twists in the case of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist: Arthur Brand, an art advisor who works to recover lost artwork, claims that the paintings may be in the hands of former IRA members. This really is turning out to be a better drama than The Crying Game. [Daily Mail]
Kenny Schachter reports on Art Basel. These are great for an insidery look at the fairs. Still, I find them hard to get through. They’re as gossipy as a juicy Linda Yablonsky column, but often assume you know or care more than a reader does. I’m also not sure I care whether Schachter managed to secure a commission for a sale, what fairs he normally goes to and which ones he skips and who’s in a bad mood because they had to stay at the Radisson. I once stayed in a mobile home parked outside a prison and managed get through the Basel fair without complaining or a shower. [artnet News]
Wow. Nearly half the staff at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art have resigned. They alleged an abusive working environment with long hours and little pay. The museum remains open, despite the HR losses. [The New York Times]
The entirety of the United Kingdom’s public sculptures will be made available online by 2020. That’s 170,000 sculptures! [The Art Newspaper]
Following a $60 million renovation, Mass MoCA is now the largest contemporary art museum in the United States. Here’s a peek at what they’re doing with the space. It’s mostly really, really monumental artworks from A-listers. [Wired]
A timeline of the MTA’s complete meltdown in 2017 annotated with passenger tweets and instagrams. There are some nice moments here, though. I especially liked graduate student who missed his graduation ceremony due to extensive delays and the New Yorkers who threw him a mock ceremony while they waited for the train to proceed. It included an exchange of cell phones as a standin for the diploma and a cell phone picture of the student having graduated. [Curbed]
Meanwhile, Governor Andrew Cuomo who controls the subways is pretending he doesn’t. I was going to say that even the famously conservative daily, The New York Post is having none of this, but I forgot Cuomo is a democrat. The MTA board meeting starts at 10 am today and is being live streamed. Watch it if you dare (expect a lot of really boring speeches). [Gothamist]
The country is blighted by massive dead shopping malls, and more are emptying out every year. LA Times asked readers to weigh in on what to do with them. One suggestion was affordable live/work space for artists. That’s such a cool idea. [Los Angeles Times]
Anish Kapoor’s latest installation, “Destierro”, at Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires is intended to speak to the refugee crisis and the idea of borders. I’m not sold on how clear that concept translates—it’s a room full of brightly colored earth and a blue bulldozer. [Dezeen]
Allison Meier reports on the Library of Congress’s exhibition “Drawing Justice: The Art of Courtroom Illustration”. It includes an extensive online component which can be seen here. [Hyperallergic]
“Republicans are the new punk,” says Sabo, a right-wing street artist who has been trolling LA with posters of Trump, among other gimmicks. Unsurprisingly, he seems like a tool. [The Guardian]

Read the full article →

Wednesday Links: More Appropriation Accusations for Damien Hirst, a Circus Art School for Portland

by Michael Anthony Farley on May 17, 2017

Left: a photo Jason deCaires Taylor took of Damien Hirst’s “Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable” and posted to Instagram. Right: Jason deCaires Taylor’s own work.

Here’s the latest bizarre beef over Damien Hirst’s Treasures From the Wreck of The Unbelievable: sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor is upset that Hirst’s work here looks a little like his schtick. Taylor, who is showing in the Biennial’s Granada pavilion, has been putting sculptures underwater for around a decade (the same amount of time Hirst started planning this show). Hirst, for his part, had been experimenting with similar processes in the 1990s, which makes Jason deCaires Taylor’s implication that Hirst plagiarised him and statement that he is “considering my options and discussing it with my legal team” even more ridiculous. There are 7 billion people on a planet with a surface that’s 75% covered with oceans. The fact that two of us had the idea to put some shit in them and leave it there isn’t surprising. [artnet News]
Here’s a very cool map: all the best mosaics in New York subway stations. [Curbed]
America’s first accredited degree program in “circus arts” is building a tent-shaped campus. The Circus Conservatory will be opening in Portland, Maine. I literally had to reread this sentence multiple times to accept that it wasn’t Portland, Oregon. [Dezeen]
The ReThink NYC plan imagines a transit system in which commuter trains can run from New Jersey, through Manhattan, and into Queens and the Bronx. They claim this, in addition to extending several subway and PATH lines to meet the new hub stations, would free up track space and avoid congestion at Penn Station. It’s always been baffling that NYC doesn’t have a connected regional commuter rail system that doubles as high-frequency rapid transit in the core, like Paris’ RER or Madrid’s Cercanias. [NJ.com]
Speaking of transit, the MTA has admitted New York City’s subways are falling apart and has released a six point plan to address the matter. The big thing is that they are planning to expedite their capital plan to purchase hundreds of new trains. Cuomo cut 65 million in funding to the MTA this year even though the train system is in dire need of repair. [Gothamist]
The Cincinnati Art Museum has received a nearly $12 million gift to establish the Alice Bimel Endowment for Asian Art (the largest in the museum’s history). In addition to the cash, Carl and Alice Bimel donated over $14 million in art objects. [ARTFIXdaily]
Sotheby’s Impressionist Modern sale had an Egon Schiele painting estimated to sell at between 30-40 million withdrawn at the last moment last night. Reports are that the sale was a bit of bore with its star lot lost. [ARTnews]
Josh Baer speculates that the cover lot (Schiele) was withdrawn because they did not anticipate a winning bidder. Ouch. [Baer Faxt]
The movie Baby Driver is inspiring so much fan art, that Kaitlyn Tiffany has written about it. The movie is about a getaway card driver who wants out of a life of crime, but his bosses won’t let him. The art looks as unoriginal as the movie does, though, which is a disappointment. [The Verge]
25 million images of art from 14 art institutions world wide are about to be digitized and put online. The partnership aims to make available 7 million images by 2020. [artnet News]
Artist Matthew Ritchie is selling his 4 million dollar loft in TriBeCa. He needs more space to work. [Curbed]
Frighteningly, a new poll finds that the majority of New Yorkers support Governor Andrew Cuomo running for president. [Politico (paywall)]

Read the full article →

Tuesday Links: Racist Art Out, Vomit Art In

by Michael Anthony Farley on May 16, 2017

Twin Peaks Metrocards are available at select subway stations. Someone please nab me a Laura Palmer! [Curbed]
Georges Berges argues that galleries are being forced to adapt to the “experience economy” as the act of purchasing becomes less about a simple exchange of goods and more about activities. This is a trend Whitney Kimball identified way back in 2015, and that I recently praised Shin Gallery for embracing. I’m not sure this is about gallerists adapting to the market’s demands (I don’t think “relational aesthetics” or sleepovers or cookouts or whatever art spaces are doing is what sells art objects to collectors) but maybe just about justifying (and enjoying) a brick-and-mortar location in today’s climate? [Observer]
21c, the art museum/hotel chain that operates on an alternative model to funding institutions in conservative states, is facing backlash at its Louisville location over a piece involving a racist postcard from the Civil War that an artist had recontextualized (apparently not very successfully) as a statement about confronting the past. After a boycott and threats of violence, 21c removed the piece. [WHAS11]
Teenage artist Sam Egli threw up on a canvas for his submission “Last Night’s Supper” to a religious-themed group show at New Zealand’s Jetcharm Gallery. It’s actually a pretty nice piece. [Stuff]
Denver-based nomadic gallery Black Cube has brought a “Colorado pavilion” to Venice as a satellite show, challenging the nationalist model of the Biennale. With text based neons from Joel Swanson and shiny gold sculptures from Laura Shill, it might sound like a fair booth on paper, but the work is gorgeous. Even Paddy (who was unphased by most of the Biennale) loved it. [artnet News]

Read the full article →

Thursday Links: Protesters Demand Trump Advisor Resign from MoMA Board

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on February 23, 2017

Protesters, including Coco Fusco, at MoMA [h/t Hyperallergic]

Venice Biennale promo is like the Christmas season—every year it starts earlier. This year, in the lead up to the show, one video spotlight per participating artist will be released each day. That’s 120 days folks. [artnet News]

Protesters are demanding that MoMA drop board member Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, due to his ties to the Trump administration. Good. Make this guy’s life hell. MoMA has refused to make a statement. [Hyperallergic]

“One of the surprising things about these artists, which isn’t always apparent in the work, is how despondent, even dystopian, they are about the internet. They might fetishise PDFs and encourage open platforms and shared interfaces (Wikipedia as art), but when interviewed they describe the web as pernicious, and technology as the glossy face of human misery.” -Alice Sprawls on One & Other at The Zabludowicz Collection. [London Review of Books]

Choreographer David St-Pierre told audiences to expect a retelling of the Joan of Arc story. “Instead, the audience was treated to 95 minutes of screeching music, dogs barking and a climactic scene where a man gets his hand stuck in a vending machine.” Montreal’s Place des Arts is now allowing people to change their tickets to more conventional works. [BBC]

Ok, people say the art world does a lot of silly things, but non-art people do even dumber things for even stranger reasons. For example, people are fighting in New York subway stations over Metrocards with an ad for clothing brand Supreme on them. The Metrocard is only good for two swipes? Can someone explain to me why this isn’t just a shittier Metrocard? [The Hundreds]

MTA ridership has dropped for the first time since 2009. This may sound like a relief given all the over crowding and delays but it means less revenue for the MTA which is already looking down the barrel of 65 million budget cut thanks to governor Cuomo. I want that guy out as governor and the talk of him running for President to end. No good comes of anything Cuomo touches. [Curbed]

Can’t wait to see all the public art proposals for the highline. Here’s hoping they’re better than the Jeremy Deller lizard on a plinth they chose to release as exemplary. [The New York Times]

Desert X claims to be the Coachella of the art world. They know the Times refused to cover Coachella last year because it had become such a shit show, right? Anyway, the show responds to the desert and actually looks pretty good. Doug Aitken has made what he calls a human scale kaleidoscope and Claudia Comte basically made a building-sized Bridget Riley. Sign me up. [The Los Angeles Times]
João Doria, the new mayor of São Paulo, has launched a program to paint over the city’s famous street art with grey. This is a terrible idea. The program includes painting over even commissioned murals if they’ve been tagged. A judge is attempting to block the grey-washing with a rule that graffiti removers must consult the city’s historic preservation department. [The Guardian]

Read the full article →

Friday Links: Virtual Mourning, Wooden Spoon Tech Breakthrough, Stairs, Trump Rooster Scares China

by Michael Anthony Farley on December 30, 2016

Well this is weird and cute. Fans of the online multi-player role play game “Star Wars: the Old Republic” have been gathering on virtual Alderan to pay tribute to an avatar of Carrie Fischer’s Princess Leia. [CBR]

Polish aristocrat Adam Karol Czartoryski just sold his family’s art collection to the Polish government for €100 million. That might sound like a lot, but the collection spanned 86,000 objects, includes da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine,” Rembrandt’s “Landscape with the Good Samaritan” and works by Renoir. The discounted sale was so undervalued the board of the family’s foundation resigned in protest. [The Telegraph]

Ever get the sense that you’re reading a listicle that should be a tad shorter than it actually is? Enter “10 Technologies That Are Defining Art Right Now”. (OooOooh!) a listicle that includes the obvious suspects—Oculus Rift, drones, and 3D technology—as well as a host of items that aren’t technologies at all. This includes “the wooden spoon” (cooking is a trend!), the kiln (so is ceramics!), and the ballpoint pen (drawing too!). Someone needs a tech writer. [artnet News]

And here’s one of the most specific (but oddly enthralling) year-end top 10 lists: “The Top 10 Staircases of 2016”. These are some pretty cool staircases. [Dezeen]

A report card for the MTA has been issued once more by Strap Hangers. The lines with the best grades were the 7, 1, and the L, and those with the worst were the 5 and the A. No surprises with the 5 and the A, but as someone who is regularly made late by rush hour traffic on the 7 line in the morning, I would suggest this report card indicates there is a lot of work to be done. And in fact, the bad news listed in the report supports this. Car breakdown increased and subway regularity decreased this year. [Strap Hangers]

The Gowanus Canal is a superfund site, but that’s not stopping some city council members from declaring that with a little rezoning the neighborhood could become New York’s Venice. People have lost their minds. [Curbed]

Researchers have “discovered” that auctions are designed push bidders emotional buttons, that time pressure makes bidders even more emotional, and that social pressure is key to securing higher bids. Who didn’t know this already? [New York Magazine]

An obscure painting from ukiyo-e master Hokusai turned up at auction in Denmark last month, where it was purchased by a Tokyo dealer. It’s an almost-unknown work with an interesting provenance and unusual characteristics for its era. [The Asahi Shimbun]

A Chinese shopping mall has erected a statue of Donald Trump as a rooster, because next lunar year is the Year of the Rooster. This thing is creepy and looks like a fried chicken company mascot. [The New York Times]

Read the full article →

Wednesday Links: Friends, Enemies, Silence, Gold

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on December 14, 2016

The Condo art event is returning to London, in which galleries in the British capital each play host to a different international gallery. Two New York galleries are participating this year, but mostly I’m excited about this map—which looks like it’s advertising a fantasy rave for libertarians thrown by M.I.A. [ArtReview]
As if any of us needed any more reasons to be upset about the current political climate, we found out yesterday that America’s sweetheart RuPaul is losing beauty sleep over the election of Donald Trump. “It feels like the death of America.” [Vulture]
Salvaged video art collective Everything is Terrible is transforming LA’s iam8bit Gallery into a VHS rental store… which only carries thousands of copies of Jerry Maguire. It opens in January. [Consequence of Sound]
Fred Lazarus, the former president of the Maryland Institute College of Art, discusses the need for cities such as Baltimore to cooperate with artist-run spaces to make them safer places, following the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland where at least one MICA alumn died. [The Baltimore Sun]
NY Times critic A.O. Scott isn’t a fan of Rogue One. It sounds like Star Wars might be getting a bit too formulaic. [The New York Times]
Net art maven Minh Nguyen on the role of social media and art in 2016: “as the year progressed… everyone went ‘You know what? Maybe the Internet is a horrible place that cements all of our biases.’ You know, fascists also make memes, the alt-right have aesthetic Tumblrs, and they’re way better and more effective at it than us… Nobody understood aesthetics better than the Nazis. You have to acknowledge that, or the optimism is really irresponsible.” She also discusses the commodification of identity politics and the legacy of Occupy. [Seattle Weekly]
Headline of the day: ‘FRIENDS AND ENEMIES’ GATHER AMID SILENCE AND GOLD FOR MARINA ABRAMOVIC’S 70TH BIRTHDAY. Sounds like the conceit of an electroclash song. [ARTnews]
Seriously, if New York can’t figure out how to fix its subway problems, it’s not going to remain much of a tourist destination. The MTA has announced that the 2,3 will no longer operate on weekends due to Sandy repairs. Repairs start this spring. [Curbed]
Alan Thicke has died. Those who grew up watching Growing Pains will find this a bit sad. Thicke played Jason Seaver, a father of three kids, in the sitcom. [LAist]
An American judge has thrown out Scott C. Mueller’s lawsuit against German gallery Michael Janssen and art advisor Marisa Newman. Mueller was suing both parties for damages related to his purchasing of Cady Noland’s “Log Cabin,” which the famously mercurial artist disavowed following unauthorized restoration work. [artnet News]
Tracey Emin has finally abandoned her controversial plan to demolish a historic East London building in order to construct a five-story live/work studio/mansion. Preservationists are breathing a collective sigh of relief. [The Guardian]

Read the full article →

Wednesday Links: Lionel Shriver in Defense of Cultural Appropriation

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on September 14, 2016

980x

A must-read: the full text of Lionel Shriver’s talk about identity politics that ignited a firestorm of controversy at the Brisbane Writers Festival. It’s worth reading in its entirety, because the most cringe-worthy “can she say that?” moments are offset by smart observations on the nature of “identity”, empathy, outrage culture, and how we challenge ourselves as artists. [The Guardian]
Finally, some good news from the MTA: bar cars are coming back to the Metro North New Haven Line. This might make life a little more more bearable for all the art world people who commute back-and-forth to/from Yale. [WTNH]

In other public transit news, one London Underground station is now covered in pictures of adorable cats. [Love Meow]

Russian billionaire Vladimir Potanin’s foundation has donated more than 250 pieces of Russian artwork to the Centre Pompidou. Much of the collection is from the 1970s, when the Soviet version of Pop Art, “Sots Art”, emerged. [Washington Post]

“Not only is Murry an artist who enters the contest annually, but in the film she’s featured alongside her blind, beret-wearing, long-haired dachshund, Hallie, also a painter. ‘I thought I had a pretty good year last year with my art,” Murry says in the film, “but my blind dog sold more art than I did.’” This review of the documentary “Million Dollar Duck,” about “the Super Bowl of Wildlife Art” is one of the weirdest things to read today. [The Seattle Times]

The Landmarks Preservation Commission is finally considering the creation of a Morningside Heights historic district. The best part of this idea is that it would mainly protect residential structures, which will hopefully preserve some relatively affordable Manhattan housing stock. [Curbed]

Last week, residents of glass luxury apartment towers overlooking the Tate Modern complained that museum goers are using the observation deck on the Tate’s new expansion to spy on them. First of all, is this really a problem? Secondly, did people not understand the concept of two-way transparency when they opted to spend ungodly amounts of money to live in apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows in the middle of London? [Dezeen]

TripAdvisor has named the Metropolitan Museum of Art the world’s top museum. Apparently they weren’t too concerned about that logo change. [artnet News]

Did Edgar Degas make a plaster cast of “Little Dancer,” discovered in 2004? Art historian, Gregory Hedberg says yes, Arthur Beale, the retired chairman of the department of conservation and collections management at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, says no. But now Beale has decided he thinks the piece is authentic and will give a talk on why at the Alliance Française this Thursday. [The New York Times]

Read the full article →

Tuesday Links: Make Your Own Boobs, Say Goodbye to Gawker, Think About “Post-Internet”

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on August 23, 2016

Homemade BoobsHomemade Boobies

Posted by Beki Files on Friday, August 19, 2016

We can’t stop watching the above video of someone explaining how to make fake boobs.
Barry Schwabsky considers post-internet art (somewhat erroneously) as a “micro-trend” that won’t go away, and traces its influence, as well as the elusive notions of sincerity and reality, through last year’s New Museum Triennial, the related DIS-helmed Berlin Biennial, and Thomas Struth’s latest exhibition. It’s a really beautiful, thought-provoking piece of criticism that adds a lot of nuance to a discussion that’s thus far been characterized by so much internet-style hyperbole and value judgements. [The Nation]
Lovefone has been retrofitting historically-landmarked but functionally obsolete public telephone booths in London as cell phone repair stations. So smart. [Dezeen]
The PATH train’s Downtown-Midtown tubes are closed for repairs. The Port Authority is dealing with this issue with a shuttle bus… despite the fact that there are faster, more frequent MTA subway lines literally running directly underneath the busses. It’s a laughably inefficient and redundant use of taxpayer funds, one indicative of the lack of regional cooperation between transit agencies. [The Transport Politic]
Gawker’s last day of publication was yesterday. Lots of thoughts from its writers on its shuttering. Nick Denton, co-founder and publisher of Gawker, writes his final thoughts. It’s a sad but poignant burial. [Gawker]
Alex Balk, a former Gawker editor, describes the blog as, “stupid, loud, bullying and ill-informed, and most days it was the only honest thing you could read.” [The Awl]
“Gawker always said it was in the business of telling true stories”, writes Tom Scocca, in a devastating account of Gawker’s demise. “Here is one last true story: You live in a country where a billionaire can put a publication out of business. A billionaire can pick off an individual writer and leave that person penniless and without legal protection.” [Gawker]
Gawker had no editorial direction, but a sensibility. Gawker was barely recognizable year to year. Gawker has history of publishing sex tapes—according to former editor Jessica Cohen’s account, Peter Thiel has made Fred Durst seem like a real pussycat. [Gawker]
MoMA PS1’s Forty casts yet another nostalgic glance (following the institution’s Greater New York) toward the city’s grittier, more glamorous heyday of “alternative spaces”. Alanna Heiss (who founded PS1 back in the day) returns as curator, presenting a redux of many of the works featured in the space’s seminal 1970s exhibition Rooms. Ben Davis argues that these artists seem to have been selected based on how famous they’ve become in the intervening years, and that the work has lost its teeth as its context changed from post-industrial to polished. We haven’t seen the show yet, but it sounds annoying. [artnet News]
Raphael Olivier’s photos of vintage Soviet architecture in Pyongyang look like a weird, low-budget sci-fi movie. [Curbed]
This has to be the wildest “Beer With a Painter” in the history of Hyperallergic: that time Enrique Chagoya received death threats from the Tea Party, Christian fundamentalists destroyed his work with a crowbar, and a pastor invited him to paint Jesus for a church. [Hyperallergic]
Wow. A California court has ruled against restitution in the case of Nazi-looted paintings at The Norton Simon Museum. [Deutsche Welle]
Hrag Vartanian asks historian Karen Wilken what the legacy of Abstract Expresionism is in the Hyperallergic podcast focusing on the Women of Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. “The idea that art is profoundly about self expression.” she replies. “Art is not about depicting or reporting what everyone can see. It is revealing something that is unseen and that is something that’s pretty fundamental. People don’t even talk about that anymore.” [Hyperallergic]

Read the full article →

Friday Links: Boldly Going to the Beach

by Michael Anthony Farley and Rea McNamara on May 27, 2016

Just in time for summer, here’s Star Trek: The Next Generation uniform swimsuits. Just don’t plan a vacation to pleasure planet Risa, it never works out. [Geeks Are Sexy]

The Romanian hacker Guccifer, who famously leaked photographs of George Bush’s paintings and claims to have hacked Hillary Clinton’s private email server, has plead guilty to charges of identity theft and unauthorized access to protected computers. He faces 2-7 years in jail. [artnet News]

Terence Dick recommends seeing Public Studio’s ambitious show at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto. The art-architectural duo have basically installed a giant LED advertising billboard inside the gallery, which is serving as light for a saplings nursery. Apparently the show touches on themes like video gaming, bioplan planting and the newly written Canadian version of the Rights of Nature. [Akimbo]

Just announced: British artist David Shrigley has been commissioned by Public Art Fund to create a 17-foot tall granite sculpture for the Doris C. Freedman Plaza this fall. Expanding on his 2008 work Gravestone, the tombstone will have a grocery shopping list engraved with items like “sausages”, “bread” and “pasta”, which may or may not earn the ire of gluten-free boot camp vegetarians working out in Central Park. [Press Release]

Meet the woman who was responsible for making you wear dreamy pastel nail polish in the 1990s: Dineh Mohajer, the founder of Hard Candy. Apparently, she originally made all the shades — remember Sky? — at home by mixing beauty supply store neon colors with bottles of Essie white polish. [Lenny]

Jonathan T. D. Neil’s predictions about the future art world imagine an Asia-centric market, individualism becoming obsolete in the face of artists working on production teams, art school grads decamping for China, and digital data usurping the importance of objects. He makes a convincing argument, but it’s predicated almost entirely on market forces. If there’s one thing about the majority of artists—for better or for worse—it’s that financial considerations are usually pretty low on the priority scale when making decisions. It’s hard to imagine artists moving en masse to a country with repressive censorship, even though the world’s top dealers and auctioneers might. And there will always be people making and buying physical things. [ArtReview]

OMG OMG OMG! The moment New Yorkers have been waiting for, 70+ years in the making: the MTA has added the Second Avenue Subway to the map. If it’s this satisfying to see the Q train snake up into the Upper East Side, just imagine how happy we’ll be decades from now when they add the teal T line. Also, the MTA is bringing the W train back into service, so that’s good news for Astoria. [New York Magazine]

Like most of our colleagues in the media industry, we’re disgusted by Peter Thiel’s revenge campaign against Gawker. Ever since it went public earlier this week that he was the money man behind Hulk Hogan’s $140 million-winning lawsuit, it raised all sorts of press freedom questions, not to mention the need for the privately-owned media company to sell some or all of their assets to continue fighting off the lawsuits Thiel’s adamantly bankrolling. Matthew Ingram explores a valuable question though: who would invest in a company knowing a Silicon Valley billionaire is so intent on destroying by any means necessary? [Fortune]

AFC senior editor Rea McNamara interviews Toronto-based painter Rajni Perera, who after years struggling in the city’s conservative commercial gallery world, is finding a lot of success in the emerging Southeast Asian art market with her fantastical, third culture perspective embellished photography. This is what the commercial gallery hustle looks like if you don’t live in a traditional art capital or make beige landscapes for all-white homes. [FADER]

Austin, Texas is booming in population, but its black residents are being pushed out to the suburbs at an alarming rate. It’s such an extreme case of displacement-by-gentrification that the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin exhaustively studied the issue. Their findings are one more warning sign of the impending crisis of slumburbia. The nation’s suburbs were never built to be good places for low-income residents, but that’s where they’re heading as cities get too expensive. [Grist]

Lucinda Barnes, UC Berkeley Art Museum’s chief curator, is stepping down. Barnes has been with the museum and film archive since 2001, and curated shows by Joan Jonas and Hans Hoffmann. She’ll retire next month. [Artforum]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

mta

Get Our Newsletter!

Like Us On Facebook!

Follow Art F City

What is Art F City?