A rendering for former Guggenheim director Thomas Krens’ new for-profit art museum in North Adams, Mass. It looks like a greenhouse.
- Former Guggenheim director Thomas Kren is opening the for-profit (and dubiously named) Global Contemporary Art Museum in the Berkshires. Renderings have been released, and the building looks a little cheap, or like a provisional exhibition space. This whole thing is weird. [Observer]
- Walid Raad’s retrospective at MoMA sounds fantastic in every sense of the word. Holland Cotter’s dizzying walkthrough describes the exhibition as “the visual equivalent of creative nonfiction, fantasy reality, truth that isn’t true.” Raad’s work has a documentary-like tone but operates with little allegiance to facts—spinning photographs and other archival “evidence” of his native Lebanon’s turbulent history into a semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical narrative. [The New York Times]
- Saatchi Gallery is aiming to confront gender imbalance in the art world with its first all-woman exhibition. Champagne Life opens next week in London and will showcase 14 emerging female artists. [Independent]
- Speaking of women, the Toronto Star is asking whether new Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will appoint only women to fill the Senate’s 22 vacancies. [The Toronto Star]
- “The deliberate decommodification of art is an interesting concept, but thinly explored; director James Crump gives more airtime to the men’s rather hilarious (especially, I imagine, to non-New Yorkers) ‘revelation’ that the awe-inspiring American Southwest existed at all.” —Sara Stewart on the Land Art documentary “Troublemakers”. [New York Post]
- A thoughtful interview with literary publicist Lauren Cerand. They talk about blogging, social media, and how to best spend one’s time. Cerand quotes Mary Ruefle paraphrasing Jane Hirshfield in the Brooklyn Rail. “She essentially said we have to keep writing” Ruefle recalled of Hirshfield, “because it’s every generation’s job to put in the present vernacular poems that are called upon for rites of passage, such as poems read at weddings or funerals. I hadn’t thought of this before. Your ordinary citizen should be able to go to the library and find a poem written in the current vernacular, and the responsibility for every generation of writers is to make this possible. We must, then, rewrite everything that has ever been written in the current vernacular, which is really what the evolution of literature is all about. Nothing new gets said but the vernacular keeps changing.” [Loveliest Magazine]
- New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is laying out plans to boost the state’s aging infrastructure. 22 billion for roads up state. 3 billion to renovate Penn Station. 1 billion to add a third track to the LIRR line. And he’s freezing tolls on the Tappan Zee Bridge and the New York State Thruway until 2020. It will be interesting to look at the budget for all this. We’ll get a chance to take a peek at the Penn Station budget next week when it’s released. [The New York Times]
- And for commentary on the Penn Station development plan, look no further than curbed. Whatever developer is chosen for the project will control all the retail in Penn Station. That’s gonna make someone real rich. [Curbed]
