Posts tagged as:

Peter Schjeldahl

Tuesday Links: Hélio Oiticica and Peter Schjeldahl Vie for Unpronounceable Name Supremacy

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on July 25, 2017

Following up on our Shark Week coverage, the Discovery Channel aired their “race” of 500 time Olympic Gold Medalist Michael Phelps swimming against a Great White Shark, and people are pissed. Obviously, they weren’t going to put Phelps in the water with a shark, but I at least thought there would be a shark. Nope. Basically, they had Phelps wear a fin to give the swimmer the same advantage the fish had, filmed him swimming alone, and then paired him with a computer animation. Lame. There were at least some good memes to come out of this whole thing though. Whomever the intern is that made this image—hire them. [The New York Times]
Hate read: a guide to New York City’s largest mega mansions. There are typically created by rich people buying two to three buildings, kicking everyone else out, and combining them into one home so oversized it’s hard to imagine most of the space being used. The list of owners living/creating mega mansions includes Michael Bloomberg, Madonna, Larry Gagosian, and Jeff Koons. [Curbed]
“I’m getting braver at saying the name of a sorely under-known Brazilian artist whose retrospective at the Whitney Museum, “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium,” comes as an overdue revelation.” This is the first line of Peter Schjeldahl’s review in The New Yorker and we’re seeing grumblings on Twitter of how offensive this is. Get a grip. If you don’t know how to pronounce a name, or if it’s hard to pronounce properly for English people, it’s embarrassing. This is an admission that he’s working to learn, not that he’s revealing his implicit racism. If anyone has a right to poke fun at unpronounceable last names, it’s a guy named Schjeldahl. [Twitter, The New Yorker]
Artist Sarah Craske found a 300 year old edition of Ovid’s “Metamorphosis” at a junk shop. She’s since cultured centuries’ worth of readers’ bacteria from over the centuries for an artwork. [The Guardian]
Why is Condo being described as an art fair alternative? The event is an gallery-share model where galleries share their space with foreign dealers for the length of a show. Is launching exhibitions now secondary to participating in art fairs? [artnet News]
It turns out Alice Cooper has had a Warhol “Electric Chair” painting rolled up in a tube in storage for decades. The rocker totally forgot he had it. [The Guardian]
Microsoft is killing off its 32 year program beloved of artists, MS Paint. Well, there goes that genre of art making. [The Guardian]

Monday Links: Committed to Citizens Through Neighborhood Policing

by Paddy Johnson and Corinna Kirsch on December 29, 2014

Our links title above is the St. Louis Police slogan. Here’s a shot of them in Ferguson Missouri, Nov 24. It is included in the Guardian’s “Best Photos of 2014” slideshow. Photograph: Jim Young, Reuters

For anyone still buying crap for the holidays I’ve found The Wirecutter’s practical gift guide very useful. [The Wirecutter]
I gotta admit, before embarking on this panda calendar thing I didn’t fully appreciate the cuteness of pandas. There’s a whole tumblr of giant pandas so you can do just that. [Giant Panda Photos]
The best photos of 2014 or crazy shit that people have seen and lived through. [The Guardian]
More shiny things will be displayed at the Palace of Versailles. We’ve seen Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami show there. Next year, it will be Anish Kapoor. [The Art Newspaper]
It’s not too late to add to your end-of-year hateread list. Alan Feuer reports that New York’s art scene is thriving, noting an underground party involving a participant wearing a red beret, and the observation that “Yes, the finance economy has brought about the $50 entree and the $3,000 studio apartment, but it’s also provided decent-paying side jobs, not to mention an audience.” [New York Times]
Artist Cauleen Smith offers her straightforward and honest opinion on overcoming racism in the arts. [Newcity Art]
Peter Schjeldahl reviews curator Laura Hoptman’s “Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” at MoMA. According to Schjeldahl, “The show broadcasts the news that substantial newness in painting is obsolete.” [The New Yorker]
What it takes to be an artist: MacArthur Grant recipient Teresita Fernández expounds in a commencement address. Maria Popova pulls out a few good quotes if you can get past the cliche intro. [Brain Pickings]

Read the full article →

Wednesday Links: Another Mass Eviction Story

by Whitney Kimball on October 8, 2014

The boss was on TV, again! Once again, Paddy Johnson appears live from Grand Rapids to talk about the 2D and installation finalists at ArtPrize. We’ll spare you the recap this time, but Kevin Buist is getting good at TV moderating. Just watch it above. [WoodTV]
How to clean an ebola-infected apartment. Throw away everything. [Daily Mail]
Wonkette has rounded up its favorite zingers from the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage in Nevada and Idaho. Basically, the court calls governors and officials in Idaho and Nevada manipulative, hypocritical, and unusually cruel bigots. [Wonkette]
All you ever wanted to know about body piercing from Hannah Cherry, who considers the job her life calling. This comes with an image of her suspended from back piercings for a Jane’s Addiction concert. Her tips: don’t pick at it. [Brightest Young Things]
This is a weird pairing: GOOD Magazine features Art Spiegelman, who just produced a silent film, WORDLESSS!, of early wordless graphic novels, with and a six-piece band led by jazz saxophonist Phillip Johnson. The film debuts at BAM in January. He says that there are still magazines that find his work too risqué for their covers. [GOOD]
This makes me so glad I work for an art blog, where trolling mainly consists of people wanting to pound across their art opinions. Game developer Kathy Sierra writes about trolling that stems from wanting to see women getting what they “deserve”. Said trolls complain that Sierra misconstrues the facts. [Serious Pony]
Crystal Castles broke up. 🙁 [Pitchfork]
Peter Schjeldahl approves of the Robert Gober’s MoMA show, which he calls “a crusade for visceral truth in art”. Prepare for extensive use of faucets and wax figures, to both beautiful and imposing ends. [New Yorker]
From my inbox: The Cooper Square Committee reports that East Village artists are among the many longtime tenants being pushed out of Allen Ginsberg’s old building. From the report:

In December of 2013, Jared Kushner purchased 170-174 East 2nd street buildings for $17 million, and quickly followed the purchase with the distribution of eviction notices to tenants of the two buildings. During the past nine months under the ownership of Kushner, tenants of both buildings were subjected to lengthy and severe construction work which has resulted in ceiling collapses, eroded floors, broken tiles, cut off gas service, and unannounced hot and cold water interruptions. Impacts on artists in the building range from fear of displacement, to damage of artwork, and compromised ability to do creative work under the stress and noise of construction.

Since Jared Kushner purchased the buildings at 170-174 East 2nd street, the Committee reports, 70 percent of its tenants have been vacated. Of the nine remaining tenants, about half are artists. Ironically, the building now boasts its “creative spirit” and history of housing artists as a draw. We’ll be watching this story. [Cooper Square Committee]

Read the full article →

Tuesday Links: Somebody Plug That Hole

by Whitney Kimball and Andrew Wagner on July 29, 2014

Orchard Street is sinking. Image courtesy of Bowery Boogie.

The sidewalk’s been sinking on Orchard Street for months. There’s been an orange cone in that hole for a while now. Somebody should prolly fix it. [Bowery Boogie]
Dollar Tree is merging with Family Dollar, but, according to Reuters, super-cheap stores are stagnating. In news that should come as no surprise to the art world, the high-end market thrives. [New York Magazine]
Last week, Spain’s Museo del Prado announced they were missing over 800 artworks in its collection. Now, it’s just been reported that they discovered one million euros in a previously unknown Swiss Bank Account. [artnet news]
What’s everybody’s fucking grudge against the subway performers? The NYPD has made the “showtime” kids a “top priority,” quadrupling arrests since last year. The Times links the trend to the return of police chief William Bratton, whose solution for an orderly city was arresting the “squeegee men” back in Giuliani’s day. [New York Times]
Peter Schjeldahl reviews the new Christopher Williams exhibition at MoMA. In it, he claims that Williams isn’t so different from Jeff Koons. As ridiculous a comparison as that sounds, Schjeldahl makes a pretty good case for it. [The New Yorker]
We missed this when it came out, but Stephen Colbert interviews Silicon Valley billionaire Tim Draper, who wants to split California into six states, making “Silicon Valley” the wealthiest state in the country and its next door neighbor “Central California” the poorest in the country. This is actually going to be a proposition on the ballot in 2016. “Do all these problems go away when they’re divvied up into six states?” Colbert asks. Lots of polite smiles. Colbert asks if Draper plans to be a senator or a governor of one of these new states, but that’ll be left “up to Californians”. [Colbert Report]
Avant-garde filmmaking legend Jonas Mekas does a questionnaire with Dazed and Confused. It’s alternately insightful and silly. A choice quote: “What three words define the States today? Jonas Mekas: Dazed And Confused.” [Dazed & Confused]
We always wondered who bought Tracey Emin’s “My Bed”, and now we know: Count Christian Duerckheim. “I always admired the honesty of Tracey, but I bought My Bed because it is a metaphor for life, where troubles begin and logics die,” he has said. Now he’s lending it to the Tate for long-term installation. [The Art Newspaper]
“Activism mainly means organizing a community, and this community organizing can come from the art world.” That’s Tommaso Speretta talks about his upcoming book on AIDS activism, REBELS REBEL: AIDS, Art and Activism in New York, 1979-1989, which looks like a must-read for people who are struggling to connect art and activism. He also says museums are slowly adding artifacts from groups like Gran Fury to their collections, but would like to see this happen more. [032c]

Read the full article →

Monday Links: Email is the Cockroach of the Internet

by Paddy Johnson Andrew Wagner Whitney Kimball on June 30, 2014

Gramsci monument

Whitney Kimball makes a case for artist resale royalties. Artists talk about why they’re so fucking poor. [Slate]
Peter Schjeldahl says that if you approach The Jeff Koons Retrospective with your eyes and mind open, you encounter Koons’s formidable aesthetic intelligence. [The New Yorker (behind the paywall)]
People are getting shot all over New York. [ANIMAL]
Now that Facebook sucks, email is supposedly the way to go. It’s being described here as the cockroach of the Internet – impossible to kill. [The Medium]
Oddly enough, David Carr over at The New York Times has written a piece on exactly the same subject that closes with a line comparing email to cockroaches. [The New York Times]
So much for the idea that Koons bankrupts himself to make his art. He’s getting a mega mansion on the Upper East Side, combining two mansions to create “one of the city’s biggest homes”. According to Page Six, the original plan included a pool and maids’ quarters but this was rejected by the Department of Buildings. Upper East Siders are complaining. [Page Six]
Speaking of neighbors complaining, residents of the gated Georgetown community Hillandale are complaining about Janet Yellen’s security detail. “Neighbors seem especially put off by the aesthetics of the security detail, in particular their blue uniforms and—in the words of one resident—’doughnut bellies.’” [Wall Street Journal]
A recent study in which Facebook altered the news feed of 689,000 of its users to see if moods were “contagious” found that, in fact, the social network can alter your mood. Zeynep Tufekci finds this very disturbing. [The Medium]
Yesterday’s Gay Pride March was led by a group of Boy Scouts. Though gay youth can join the organization, openly gay adults are still banned as leaders. [The New York Times]

Read the full article →

Tuesday Links: Apologies!

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on June 17, 2014

Terry Richardson

“Is Terry Richardson an Artist or a Predator?” NY Mag follows Terry Richardson around and gives a thorough report on his skeezy, idiotic past. It’s a good primer on all the various lawsuits against him. [The Cut]
The Frick is getting supersized; Peter Schjeldahl approves. The position reads as arbitrary. [The New Yorker]
Joe Scanlan is a white male artist who hires black female actors to play his character Donelle Woolford, a hot young artist who gets a leg up in the art world because of her race. Needless to say, when “Donelle Woolford” was asked to participate in the Whitney Biennial, this led to a slew of protests; Yams, a mostly queer black artist/poet/musician collective, even withdrew from the Biennial. Now Ryan Wong claims that he is Joe Scanlan, and the character was created to deflect this kind of rampant deafness. We gather that this is a joke since Scanlan has a faculty bio on Yale’s website, but Wong’s analysis of Scanlan’s “apology” letter sounds familiar. [Hyperallergic]
Speaking of Joe Scanlan, Carolina Miranda’s epic summary is the last word on the Donelle Woolford. Her thorough, even-handed report includes some interesting quotes from Jennifer Kidwell, who plays Woolford, and has otherwise almost been left out of the debate entirely. [LA Times]
MoMA has added a downloadable app to its design collection; Bjork’s 2011 album “Biophilia” which was made available as an app with visualizations too. [Culture: High & Low]
This year alone, Germany doubled government funding for recovering Nazi-looted art to to 4 million Euros. [Deutsche Welle]
Jerry Saltz on zombie abstraction. Meh, we’ve all been talking about how process-based abstraction has taken over the art world for a while. Not too much new here. [Vulture]
Karen Rosenberg is amazed at Kara Walker’s curatorial ability because she likes both music and art. Rosenberg writes: “Who else would think to compare the Notorious B.I.G.’s ‘Ten Crack Commandments’ and F. T. Marinetti’s ‘Manifesto of Futurism,’ as she does in her introduction to ‘Ruffneck Constructivists’?” [New York Times]
The Joan Mitchell Foundation has created a new artists’ retreat in New Orleans! But wait: The facilities still need to be built and will cost approximately $16.5 million. [Nonprofit Quarterly]
Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program is open to non-profits and artists with a strong exhibition record. The spaces are located in DUMBO and are offered at $12 per foot per year, with a three-year lease. That’s well below market. [Two Trees]
Yesterday, Paddy Johnson interviewed the Theo Westenberger Estate, which is giving out tons of money and resources for artists. (Photographers, we’re talking to you.) They’ve just announced the that Gaea Woods is the winner of their 2014 photo contest, which gives out $5,000 in unrestricted funds. [Facebook]

Read the full article →

Tuesday Links: Money and Creeps

by The AFC Staff on January 28, 2014

It’s Old Masters Week! That might not have much appeal to the world-at-large, but all week, New York’s auction houses are putting Renaissance works up on the block. One new development this year: Sotheby’s is introducing a private selling exhibition in conjunction with its auction. [Gallerist NY]
Mana Contemporary is hedging its bets on Jersey City’s tourism industry. The New Jersey-based art gallery, studio, and storage space has plans to build a Jersey City hotel, as well as a sculpture park and theatre near the Mana campus. And because Mana owner Moishe Mana has money—or an affinity for risk—new Mana “branches” are in the works for London and Los Angeles, and there’s a plan for a street-art museum close to the Holland Tunnel. [The Art Newspaper]
If you have a penis you may be more likely to get sick this winter. [Salon]
This whole Gawker vs. Quentin Tarantino controversy is way less interesting than the time they outed him as a toe-sucking creep. [Gawker]
Some good news for writers: The Knight Foundation is launching a new $1 million initiative to fund non-profit journalism. Applications open February 1, 2014. [Nieman Journalism Lab]
The new iPhone os won’t auto-correct misspellings of “abortion.” There are many other “hot button” words that also aren’t offered auto-corrections, but they aren’t equivalents; “rape,” “murder,” “virginity,” or the like. The more I think about this policy, the more offensive I find it. [The Daily Beast]
Your hate-read for the day: 750 words on why interviewing foxy celebrities ruined this journalist’s ability to date women who weren’t famous. [The New York Times]
Carolina Garcia Jayaram has been named CEO of United States Artists, a major grantmaking organization for artists. She leaves her position as Executive Director of the Chicago Artists Coalition. [United States Artists, via: Art Daily]
When discussing the work of William Burroughs, art critic Peter Schjeldahl describes the difference between literary criticism and art criticism. “The experience [of literature] is so drawn out,” he tells the New Yorker. “The experience of art works is very concentrated and it can be renewed. It doesn’t take very much time.” [The New Yorker, via: Andrew Russeth]
Legendary folk singer, amazing person and activist, Pete Seeger has died at age 94. [The Guardian]

Read the full article →

Critics’ Q&A with Paddy Johnson on ARTINFO

by Paddy Johnson on July 9, 2013

Today I spent a bit of time talking to ArtINFO Canada’s Sky Goodden about criticism here and in Canada for her Critics Q&A Series. Turns out, I’ve got quite a bit to say.

Read the full article →

Massive Links: Business, Business, and More Business

by Paddy Johnson on February 21, 2013

Postmasters is moving out of Chelsea. Shroeder Romero has closed. Larissa Goldston is looking for a new space and can’t find one that’s within her price range. This piece doesn’t ask artists how this affects them, but maybe it’s time to talk to a few. They’re a little lower down in the food chain, so I bet there’s some real suffering there too. [Bloomberg]
Artspace raises 8.5 in VC money and has hired Walter Robinson. Robinson will work with former ArtINFO Editor-in-Chief Andrew Goldstein. Naturally, the first piece this e-commerce site for collectors publishes by Robinson is a piece on collecting. Lets hope the subject matter expands. [ArtSpace]
Hyperallergic announces the World’s First Tumblr Art Symposium. I bet this is going to be really good. I’ve never seen anyone better at moderating a panel than Hyperallergic’s Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian and the blog is all over tumblr. I can’t wait to see what he does with a symposium. [Hyperallergic]
The arts section at TimeOut New York is looking REALLY scant. Yikes. [TimeOut]
Peter Schjeldahl on Surrealist drawing at the Morgan Library. [Paywall. The New Yorker]

Read the full article →

Flamers: Schjeldahl Versus Saltz

by Corinna Kirsch on January 15, 2013

This week, we get two critics’ opinions on MoMA’s latest painting show, “Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925”. Is it a “splendid historical survey” (Schjeldahl) or “history written by the winners” (Saltz)?

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Peter Schjeldahl

Critics’ Q&A with Paddy Johnson on ARTINFO

Get Our Newsletter!

Like Us On Facebook!

Follow Art F City

What is Art F City?