Image credit: New York Daily News
- George Zimmerman is a painter, apparently. His latest works? Paintings of Confederate flags that you can buy prints of from a gun dealer’s website. There’s also a contest involved. [TMZ]
- The NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association somehow manages to be even more Orwellian than its name. The group has been encouraging off-duty police officers to photograph the city’s booming homeless population. Those images have been posted to the Association’s social media accounts in some sort of attempt to …shame people into not being homeless? [Hyperallergic]
- Dragan Espenschied weighs in on Blingee’s imminent “sunsetting”, and what made it so attractive to artists with an internet-based practice: it was a web 2.0 “stupid” image-making tool with a distinct aesthetic (glitter!) operating within a web 1.0 community model. “Looking at a blingee in blingee display mode is like going through a 1990’s free graphics collection that amateurs used to exchange elements for their homepages.” Also: apparently Blingee’s super-users were Russian grandmothers. Who knew? [One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age]
- The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation has just announced that it will offer funding to select New York Organizations in the following sectors: arts education, public art, art in community and service centers, artistic activism, community-based museums, expanded access to art, art in the service of social justice or change and the promotion of under-recognized artistic practice. [The Observer]
- Gilbert Vicario has been hired by the Phoenix Art Museum as the new curator of contemporary art, a position the museum hasn’t seen filled in over a decade. This comes in the midst of a major personnel exodus and re-shuffle under the new museum directorship of Amada Cruz. [Artforum]
- Charlotte, North Carolina now has the rarefied status right of having an all-Drake radio station on their FM dial. Jealous! [CBC]
- “If a company like Samsung with sufficiently deep pockets can keep battling until [the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office] eventually decides that maybe its patents should never have been awarded in the first place, what’s the point?” Apple loses one of its design patents, and its lawsuit with Samsung continues. Eye roll. [Cult of Mac]
- Check out this slideshow archive of photographs, news clippings, and posters from Baltimore’s defunct Proposal Gallery. The artist-run space rented a storefront for $1 a year in the late 70s/early 80s. You know, back when you could buy a house for a dollar. This is why my generation is so bitter. [City Paper]
- That time period is the subject of a new exhibition at Frankfurt’s Städel Museum. Figurative—and in particular, “bad”—painting made a comeback in West Germany as a reaction to minimalism. Bonus: I learned a new German word, one of those impossibly long, oddly specific words for an abstraction that German does so well that we have no equivalent for. “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” is to come to terms with the past and dark history of one’s culture. [The Economist]
- It’s mid-August, so you know what that means: announcements from the Toronto International Film Festival regardings its early-September slate of gala premieres and red carpet photo calls. While many focus on its significance in Hollywood — it’s People’s Choice Award is considered a precursor for Oscar glory — it’s also important for its programming of experimental and video art. So, that being said, we’re looking forward to its Wavelengths programme, and world premieres by Mark Lewis (he represented Canada at the 2009 Venice Biennale) and Mexican auteur Nicolàs Pereda. [Toronto International Film Festival]
- Cy Gavin, who is presently showing at Sargent’s Daughters, incorporates materials such as his father’s cremated remains into his paintings. [The New York Times]
- The six most popular art exhibitions, according to the Instagram hive-mind. [artnet News]
- Internet shame army, London, Ontario police need your help: a woman has been filmed stealing flowers from a gravesite, and they are trying to identify her. [BuzzFeed]
