Venice Biennale

Edi Rama

• Today, May 18th, is apparently International Museum Day, organized by the International Council of Museums (ICOM)  and Art Museum Day, organized by the Association of Art Museum Directors. I (Michael) had never heard of either of these designations until this year. Museums worldwide will be offering free or reduced admission, and here in the USA, many are using the day as a rallying cry to save museum and arts funding from the conservatives. [Hyperallergic]

• Olly Gibbs has been using Face App to make artworks in the Rijksmuseum smile. These are cute. And much less creepy than seeing your friends as old people on Instagram, the app’s usual function. [The Poke]

• Christina Ruiz seems to agree with Paddy’s takedown of the Venice Biennale. The review is packed with hilarious snippets like this:

“A video documents the US choreographer Anna Halprin’s ‘Planetary Dance’, a gathering of middle-class white people on a hilltop in Marin County, California, where they chant, run around in circles and express their horror for all war and violence. Halprin staged this performance in 1981 to “reclaim” Mount Tamalpais from the clutches of a serial killer who was targeting female hikers in the area. People were “gripped by terror” the video informs us. But then Halprin staged her Planetary Dance and the killer was caught! Amazing.
It may be fun, even life-changing, to take part in a Planetary Dance. I don’t know because I’ve never done it. What I do know is that it is neither fun nor life-changing to sit through a video of one.”

[The Art Newspaper]

• Adrian Searle doesn’t care for the biennale but finds quite a bit to like in the pavilions. Anne Imholf’s “Faust” gets a lot of attention, as it should. [The Guardian]

• And on the subject of Edi Rama, the Prime Minister of Albana and an artist included in the Biennale, critic Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei writes, “We are still waiting for the moment the international art press will shift its attention from Rama’s wallpaper and doodles to the actual “political canvas” this man has been painting in Albania, which has included landscapes of weed plantations, concrete-covered archeological treasures, natural reserves exploited by oligarchs for enormous profits, and a stunning portrait of a collapsing political system.” The catalogue mostly talks about how Rama transformed the city of Tirana into a color field painting as mayor and how his doodles draw from the tradition of surrealists. [Exit, via Walter Robinson]

• In Slate’s new podcast series on working, in which they ask “What Do You Do All Day?” musician Dan Deacon gives a tour of his studio and talks about his process. I haven’t listened to the whole thing yet, but it’s worthwhile and humorously relatable to anyone who works from home/in a creative field. [Slate]

• Does the world really need this many words to let us know Jimmy Fallon isn’t relevant? [The New York Times]

• I’m unclear on why exactly Cabinet Gallery was invited to build their new, extremely ugly brick-and-mortar location (financed by including luxury residential units above the gallery) inside Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, a public park in London. I suppose it’s a public benefit that they included an artist residency, but this seems like an inappropriate (and mostly ugly) use of public land set aside for green space. There are plenty of examples of creatively-massed architecture that creates street-facing retail spaces while actually improving the public space it backs on to (the recent Lincoln Center plaza overhaul, for example). [Dezeen]

• Hmm. The first trailer for Star Trek: Discovery is here and it’s not very promising. The production quality looks like a low budget flick on the SyFy network and I suspect I’m not alone in prequels-nobody-asked-for fatigue. (When can we get a new post-DS9 movie or series?) I’ll definitely watch it somewhere, but it’s absurd of CBS to expect people to pay for a streaming subscription based on this trailer. [io9]

• Headline of the day: “Going to Art School Could Help Save Your Job From the Robots” [artnet News]

• SoundGarden frontman Chris Cornell and Fox News Founder Roger Ailes have both died of unrelated causes. Cornell was 52, and Ailes 77. [The Internet]

• Christie’s Post-War auction was through the roof, by ARTnews’s account. Josh Baer said it felt a little ho-hum even though it performed perfectly—perhaps because the expectations were so high. [ARTnews, BAER FAXT]