Wednesday Links: Does a Market Crash Lead to an Art Boom?

Patrick Hogan tours the University of Wisconsin: Milwaukee’s abandoned Second Life campus.

Remember Second Life? apparently most colleges don’t. When there was a lot of hype over the virtual environment nearly a decade ago, many universities opened “campuses” in the video-game-like platform. Today, these are mostly abandoned and really weird. Patrick Hogan decided to tour some of them—encountering weird features such as teleportation-accessible classrooms, board rooms on pirate ships, creepy art collections, and even squatters. [Fusion]

After this weekend’s “$1.5 million punch” of a Seventeenth Century Paolo Porpora by a Taiwanese boy, a look at the costliest art accidents. [BBC]

Apply to be a TED Fellow. Fellows, of which there are 20, get an expense paid trip to the TED conference, give a TED talk, plus coaching, mentorship and connections to the network. They’re looking for “groundbreaking” projects and ideas “worth spreading”, which isn’t the way most art worlders would chose to describe themselves, even if accurate, but it’s a powerful platform, so probably worth the small amount of time it will take to apply. [TED]

Good news: the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annexation of the former Whitney building sounds like it’s going to be great. The “Met Breuer” is undergoing a renovation to restore the Marcel Breuer structure to its high-modernist glory and will feature free performance/installation space, a “book bar” for artists’ books, and a reopened cafe. [ARTnews]

Other Met milestones: the addition of non-western art in the 1960’s. Here, a look at how the inclusion of what was then called “Primitive Art” changed the course of museum culture. [Observer]

Non-profit administrators and grant writers will appreciate this piece on how some grant applications can perpetuate inequity. It’s basically a list things granting agencies do to make the task of applying so complex, that applicants can spend up to 70 hours applying grants they may not even get. Is this not any government grant application ever? [NonProfit With Balls]

A guide to eating oysters that makes us want to eat oysters. Unlike farming salmon and shrimp, farming oysters is good for the environment! This piece is beautifully illustrated too. [Lucky Peach]

Is anyone else totally confused by how the commercial art markets work? Apparently the global stock market crash has resulted in a lot of attention being unseasonably poured into art investments, as collectors are looking for liquidity in their assets. [Bloomberg]

Jillian Steinhauer visits the Icelandic Folk Art and Outsider Art Museum. OMG, it looks so good. So much weird figuration. [Hyperallergic]

How to feel about this? A real estate developer who admits to targeting artist-friendly neighborhoods for gentrification has announced the Slate Property Arts and Culture Endowment, which will dole out $80,000 worth of grants for projects in North Brooklyn. Is this actually a way for Slate to “give back to the community” and help artists avoid displacement? Or is this more PR propaganda that might actually grease the wheels of gentrification? If anything, it threatens to align the art community with developers in the minds of other residents—driving one more wedge between artists and other low-income groups who need to be building coalitions to keep neighborhoods affordable. [DNAinfo]