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The New York Times

Friday Links: Texas Enema Performance Art Ends Up Messy

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on February 24, 2017

“My bartender was throwing up behind the bar… Plus, it was indecent exposure. They made performance art look bad.” – Mariana Lemesoff, owner of Houston venue Avant Garden on a performance by Sonic Rabbit Hole. Member Michael Clemmons is accused of butt-chugging a protein shake and then projectile shitting all over a fundraiser party for an artist with cancer. [The Huffington Post]

Programmer Christopher Hesse’s image translation software is amazing. Basically, you can draw a rudimentary building or shoe and an AI will render it semi-photo-realistically based on its knowledge of images from internet databases (think Google Deep Dream in reverse). But what the internet uses this incredible technology for is cats. Terrifying, terrifying drawings of monster cats. How long until someone makes the scary porn version of this? [The Next Web]

“Now more than ever, in my short lifetime at least, we need the ‘Scullys’ of the world to step up. Whether you’re squinting at a lab bench, or giving a voice to the oppressed in a courtroom, or chasing justice in three-inch heels, you are an integral part of the fight. You will not always win. But like Scully, I implore you to persist.” -Abby Norman on the importance of The X-Files, the show that inspired her (and countless other girls) to pursue science. [Paste]
Speaking of science, it’s close to 20 degrees above normal high temperatures today in New York and the surrounding area, a phenomenon scientists call Climate Change. They are worried that these changes will endanger all life on earth, but some people don’t believe the changes are real. One of these people has just been appointed head of the EPA. [The Internet]
The New York Times has announced it will embark on a massive brand campaign In an effort to educate the public on what journalists do, how facts are mined, and the importance of truth, narrative and responsible media in the age of Trump. This is important. Subscribe to the Times and support what they do. We’ve got independent media, and the the judicial system to blunt Trump right now and that’s it. If you want to make a difference, that’s where you spend your money. [The New York Times]
How Soleilmoon Recordings, a Northeast Portland indie record outlet, landed on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups. [Willamette Weekly]
Related: Depeche Mode wants everyone to know that Richard Spencer’s infatuation with them is most definitely a one-way street. [Gothamist]
New York could add thousands of relatively affordable basement apartments to the city’s existing single-family housing stock. The biggest obstacle that stands in a pilot program’s way: parking minimums. It’s beyond absurd that nearly every American city’s housing initiatives are thwarted by car-related zoning, as if owning a car were mandatory and regulating where people store their belongings were a government issue. [Curbed]
Well, that didn’t last for four years. Shia LaBeouf has terminated his streaming performance HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US, which had been moved to New Mexico, after gunshots were heard in the vicinity. [People]

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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]

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Tuesday Links: Imelda Marcos Collected More than Just Shoes, Chinese Artists Arrested

by Michael Anthony Farley on December 13, 2016

McDonald’s daring homage to contemporary art. pic.twitter.com/wjNrAz9rI8

— Giovanni Tiso (@gtiso) December 11, 2016

The Philippines has spent three decades trying to track down the illegally-purchased art collection of late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos and his wife Imelda. Now they’re taking to the web, using the hashtag #ShowMeTheMonet. [The New York Times]
The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016 is designed to make it easier for rightful heirs to claim Nazi-looted artwork in the United States. [Smithsonian]
The New York Times has retired its weekly “Inside Art” column, to be replaced by a new series, “Show Us Your Wall,” which will profile different collectors in their homes. This is supposed to target a broad audience. The “Arts, Briefly” column will now run six days a week. [ARTnews]
Has anyone else seen Walter Robinson: A Retrospective at Jeffrey Deitch? David Ebony seems to like the show, claiming Robinson infused some heart into pop subject matter. The review makes me want to see the work for myself, which is always a good thing. [Art in America]
A group of artists in Chengdu, China have been arrested for a performance protesting out-of-control air pollution. Their criminal act? Walking around the city center en masse wearing filtration masks. [BBC News]
“Ghost Ship is our Fields Triangle factory fire.” Eva Wingren attributes the tragedy in Oakland to gentrification and housing injustice. She relates this to the recent eviction of the Bell Foundry artists in Baltimore, and a model of collective ownership that’s been a successful alternative. [Rooflines]

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Tuesday Links: This is the Last of the Them for a While

by Paddy Johnson on November 29, 2016

We’re opening our show “Strange Genitals” at Satellite, so between that and covering the fairs we’ve got our hands full. This is the last of the links for the week.

The secret trash collection of a retired New York sanitation worker Nelson Molina is its own museum. I want to see this so badly. [Atlas Obscura]
I’m a little skeptical of the idea that Ivanka Trump is a voice of reason. Artists are protesting outside her house because she buys contemporary art and seems to be more rationale than her father. But she spent the week leading up to the holidays meeting with foreign leaders about Trump Hotels and has filed 25 new trademark registrations since the beginning of the year. (Meaning they’ve been making plans for their conflicts of interest to pay off.) She’s just as corrupt as her father. [The New York Times]
I’ve been following Hrag Vartanian pretty closely on Facebook these days. He went to Standing Rock North Dakota over thanksgiving to report on the protests there and is promising a podcast this week. Standing Rock is an Indian reservation of the Sioux Tribe and the protests regard the Dakota Access Pipeline, which directly threatens the only water supply for the Standing Rock Reservation. [Facebook]
No Miami based artists were chosen for the Whitney Biennial. [The New York Times]

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Friday Links: New York Central Art Supply Closes Today

by Michael Anthony Farley on September 2, 2016

Generally, cats are assholes. Apparently this is because they’re usually bored. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley want cat owners to make their pets work for their food—they suggest “food puzzles” where the cat has to solve a problem to access a snack. I feel like this is going to lead to plenty of YouTube videos that are more entertaining for humans than cats. [Gizmodo]

After 111 years of operation in the East Village, New York Central Art Supply Inc. is closing today. The store supplied Andy Warhol, Basquiat, and even De Kooning’s Hamptons studio on the weekends. If you have the time today, swing by and say goodbye/pick up some discounted paint. [The Wall Street Journal]

Nathan Lyons, influential photographer, curator, and critic, has died at the age 86. Lyons’ contributions to the field were enormously important for cementing photography’s place in the annals of contemporary art. [The New York Times]

As Rhizome turns 20, ART news looks at the organization’s history (“it’s older than the Metropolitan Museum of Art in internet years”.) From humble email list in Berlin to major cultural archive, Rhizome has done a lot. This is a long read, but a good one. [ART news]

After Ai Weiwei was excluded from the Yinchuan Biennale for “political reasons”, Anish Kapoor is now threatening to withdraw in protest. [artnet News]

The New York Times has ceased publishing local arts sections for the city’s suburbs. There will no longer be, for example, Connecticut or Westchester arts coverage for the Connecticut or Westchester editions of the paper, respectively. People are pissed. [artnet News]

MAC Cosmetics and Star Trek have teamed up for an unlikely cross-promotional marketing thing that has resulted in these YouTube makeup tutorials. They’re not particularly useful—s model does makeup “inspired” by a character and ends up looking insane every time—but they’re impossible to look away from. [YouTube]

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One Day Into the World Without Gawker

by Paddy Johnson on August 23, 2016

For those of us who started and maintained blogs in the mid aughts, yesterday’s closure of Gawker wasn’t easy to watch. A year ago, I published a list of art blogs and magazines with Corinna Kirsch, full of headings modified with words like “active”, “not-active”, “defunct”, and “deleted”. It was already the end of an era then. Now, with the demise of the largest and arguably the most pioneering of blogs, I find myself wondering who amongst us will be left standing.

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Tuesday Links: Pained Cries Over the Whitney’s Spilt Milk

by Paddy Johnson and Corinna Kirsch on April 28, 2015

The new Whitney. Photograph Ed Lederman. Image via: The Whitney

A grumpy review by Christopher Knight about the Whitney’s new digs. It’s a tourist attraction. The art doesn’t start until the 5th floor. The collection is parochial. There aren’t enough West Coast artists in the collection! Get a grip, dude. Sure, the collection is parochial, but on balance it should have been mentioned that the museum is doing better than their contemporaries. The rest of these complaints seem really trivial. [The L.A. Times]
A great, simple first-hand account of what happened yesterday when one person stumbled upon teenagers and police in Baltimore. [What I Saw While Riding My Bike Around Today]
Sara Reisman, director of New York’s Percent for Art Program, gets a new job. She’s been appointed the artistic director of the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. [Artforum]
In an article on Francis Bacon self-portraits going to auction, we learn that Bacon liked to paint himself to look youthful. “Although Bacon was in his 60s he looked much younger in the work, having dyed his hair and worn make-up as he grew older.” So he’s normal [BBC]
From the “Hiscox Online Art Trade Report 2015: “ Investment return is a growing motivation for online art buyers, with as many as 63% driven to purchase by a piece’s potential return on investment.” [Hiscox]
More on flipping for investment with sneakerheads, obsessive tennis-shoe collectors, compared to art collectors. [It’s Vintage]
Canine private investigator. [Craigslist]
You know The Toronto Star is running low on story ideas when they dedicate an entire story to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s tweets from last year. The paper claims this has made him a “Twitter star” among other world leaders, but provides no evidence to support the headline. [The Toronto Star]
A collection of sparkling prose from recent New York Times articles. My favorite is the following lede by James Gorman: “For anyone who has ever been told by a smarty-pants 7-year-old, ‘There’s no such thing as Brontosaurus; it’s called Apatosaurus’ — it is payback time.” [The New York Times]

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Wednesday Links: Call Your Grandma

by Paddy Johnson and Corinna Kirsch on October 1, 2014

The New York Times reports that it will cut 100 newsroom jobs, and more. They need to give people more reasons to read the paper, not less. [The New York Times]
It’s National Kale Day. It’s also World Vegetarian Day. It’s also International Day of Older Persons. Celebrate. Eat a salad and call your grandma. [The Internet]
Threshold Entertainment, the people behind those Mortal Kombat movies from the 1990s, are partnering with the makers of Tetris on a live-action Tetris movie. “It’s a very big, epic sci-fi movie,” claims Threshold CEO Larry Kasanoff. As you probably remember, Tetris is a puzzle game about stacking blocks. [Future Tense via The Wall Street Journal]
A new piece by Constant Dullaart works on the false assumption that all Instagram followers are equal. He’s bought followers on Instagram and assigned them to specific Instagram accounts in order to “level influence.” Engagement levels of these followers aren’t mentioned once. This project doesn’t do much more than illustrate bad business practice. [ARTnews]
In a Medium story, a teenager accuses a 29-year-old Brooklyn “alt-lit” editor of rape. Other teenage girls come out with similar stories. [Gawker]
Want: Trip to Iceland. The National Gallery of Iceland is opening the “Vasulka Chamber,” a research department devoted to preserving video art and new media. The chamber is named after Woody and Steina Vasulka, founders of the Kitchen. [e-flux]
The Guggenheim plans a second location in New York. [Hyperallergic via The Art Newspaper]
Artist Tony Fitzpatrick sure can tell a story. In his latest Dime Story column for New City he recalls a period of time he spent bartending for a rather unsavory cast of characters: “[The bar] was full of bikers and mechanics and hard-labor guys who didn’t much like the ‘college pukes.’ They scared the shit out of me, and I was careful to keep my head and learned the gentle art of cutting people off when I sensed trouble. This was a culture full of the white people we don’t put on the brochures, with guys named Orville and Roland, a lot of wide foreheads and disappearing chins. I swear some of these guys were their own uncles.” [New City]
Because nobody knows how to make decisions without advice from the Internet, here’s a venn diagram on how to pick the perfect office plant. [The Huffington Post]

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