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DIS

This Week’s Must-See Art Events: The AFC Goth Benefit and More

by Michael Anthony Farley on April 17, 2017

The time has finally come. Our Goth Benefit is here. We’ll be converting Collapsable Hole into a goth wonderland, complete with drag performers, surprise guests, and options such as handcuffs for couples. (We’re also having a goth couple outfit contest, so plan accordingly). If last year’s benefit was any indication, this is basically going to be the party of the year.

Wednesday, nurse your hangover with a likely-nipple-tastic Betty Tompkins solo show at Marlborough Contemporary. Other highlights this week include Siebren Versteeg’s digital paintings at bitforms on Thursday, the annual Seven on Seven conference at the New Museum on Saturday, and Sunday’s open studios at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Don’t forget: Buy your Goth Opera tickets now!

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The Worst Shows of 2016: What’s the MoMA Björkgate of the Year?

by Michael Anthony Farley on December 30, 2016

In which we look back at AFC’s most vitriolic reviews of mediocre exhibitions.

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NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: The Best NSFW GIFs from DIS/dump

by Michael Anthony Farley on August 31, 2016

Back in 2010, before they were curating controversial international biennials, DIS collaborated with the image-sharing website dump.fm to produce DIS/dump. The project represented a crowd-sourced, user-generated “lookbook” of absurdist “New Style Options in Real Time.”

Their curated documentation of the project is fantastic, and much of the content points to the fact that “fashion” is essentially just censorship of nudity.

See more after the jump.

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Tuesday Links: Make Your Own Boobs, Say Goodbye to Gawker, Think About “Post-Internet”

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on August 23, 2016

Homemade BoobsHomemade Boobies

Posted by Beki Files on Friday, August 19, 2016

We can’t stop watching the above video of someone explaining how to make fake boobs.
Barry Schwabsky considers post-internet art (somewhat erroneously) as a “micro-trend” that won’t go away, and traces its influence, as well as the elusive notions of sincerity and reality, through last year’s New Museum Triennial, the related DIS-helmed Berlin Biennial, and Thomas Struth’s latest exhibition. It’s a really beautiful, thought-provoking piece of criticism that adds a lot of nuance to a discussion that’s thus far been characterized by so much internet-style hyperbole and value judgements. [The Nation]
Lovefone has been retrofitting historically-landmarked but functionally obsolete public telephone booths in London as cell phone repair stations. So smart. [Dezeen]
The PATH train’s Downtown-Midtown tubes are closed for repairs. The Port Authority is dealing with this issue with a shuttle bus… despite the fact that there are faster, more frequent MTA subway lines literally running directly underneath the busses. It’s a laughably inefficient and redundant use of taxpayer funds, one indicative of the lack of regional cooperation between transit agencies. [The Transport Politic]
Gawker’s last day of publication was yesterday. Lots of thoughts from its writers on its shuttering. Nick Denton, co-founder and publisher of Gawker, writes his final thoughts. It’s a sad but poignant burial. [Gawker]
Alex Balk, a former Gawker editor, describes the blog as, “stupid, loud, bullying and ill-informed, and most days it was the only honest thing you could read.” [The Awl]
“Gawker always said it was in the business of telling true stories”, writes Tom Scocca, in a devastating account of Gawker’s demise. “Here is one last true story: You live in a country where a billionaire can put a publication out of business. A billionaire can pick off an individual writer and leave that person penniless and without legal protection.” [Gawker]
Gawker had no editorial direction, but a sensibility. Gawker was barely recognizable year to year. Gawker has history of publishing sex tapes—according to former editor Jessica Cohen’s account, Peter Thiel has made Fred Durst seem like a real pussycat. [Gawker]
MoMA PS1’s Forty casts yet another nostalgic glance (following the institution’s Greater New York) toward the city’s grittier, more glamorous heyday of “alternative spaces”. Alanna Heiss (who founded PS1 back in the day) returns as curator, presenting a redux of many of the works featured in the space’s seminal 1970s exhibition Rooms. Ben Davis argues that these artists seem to have been selected based on how famous they’ve become in the intervening years, and that the work has lost its teeth as its context changed from post-industrial to polished. We haven’t seen the show yet, but it sounds annoying. [artnet News]
Raphael Olivier’s photos of vintage Soviet architecture in Pyongyang look like a weird, low-budget sci-fi movie. [Curbed]
This has to be the wildest “Beer With a Painter” in the history of Hyperallergic: that time Enrique Chagoya received death threats from the Tea Party, Christian fundamentalists destroyed his work with a crowbar, and a pastor invited him to paint Jesus for a church. [Hyperallergic]
Wow. A California court has ruled against restitution in the case of Nazi-looted paintings at The Norton Simon Museum. [Deutsche Welle]
Hrag Vartanian asks historian Karen Wilken what the legacy of Abstract Expresionism is in the Hyperallergic podcast focusing on the Women of Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. “The idea that art is profoundly about self expression.” she replies. “Art is not about depicting or reporting what everyone can see. It is revealing something that is unseen and that is something that’s pretty fundamental. People don’t even talk about that anymore.” [Hyperallergic]

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Wednesday Links: Art Mimicking Products, Products Mimicking Art

by Paddy Johnson and Rhett Jones on June 29, 2016

trojan_energizer_Dash

DIS responds to critics of the Berlin Biennale. The collective says that “people may leave feeling angry or uncomfortable, which is a valid response, and it’s better than them feeling gratified as if they’d just recycled, or donated to a cause.” They go on to say that “the big mistake people make is to see this as a disillusioned or cynical or fatalist perspective.” The interview sounds a lot smarter than the show looks. [Ocula]
If the auction at Sotheby’s yesterday is any indication it seems that international players are taking advantage of the devalued British currency. Works by Keith Haring and Jenny Saville broke records and overall sales were characterised as “reassuring.” London dealer Harry Blain said that “It’s such an international market. If you are looking at something in terms of sterling it is a lot less expensive than it was three days ago.” [The Art Newspaper]
A ranking of all 156 Amazon dash buttons. There’s something unsettling about the branded devices that reorder common items like detergent or toilet paper with a single button press. This list gets it right with Trojan condoms coming in at number one. [Motherboard]
Airbnb is suing San Francisco over on-going regulatory disputes that were initially kicked off by affordable housing advocates. The city decided on June 7th to fine Airbnb $1,000 a day for every unregistered host on the site. This follows a move by New York to fine users of Airbnb who rent a whole apartment for fewer than 30 days. [New York Times]
Stella Schnabel has opened a “music club that’s like an art gallery.” How is it more like a gallery than a venue? That remains unclear. It sounds as if Ms. Schnabel is just unaware of the large DIY venue scene in New York and her music space is more like an art gallery because it is not Madison Square Garden. Also, they serve fruit punch instead of alcohol. [Wall Street Journal]
You can rent photographer Annie Leibovitz’s former four-floor townhouse in the West Village for a mere $13,500 a month. It’s shaped like a triangle, so good luck doing anything interesting with the space. [Curbed]
Once again, the New York City Rent Guidelines Board approved a rent freeze on all one-year leases. [Capital New York]
Artists are no longer flocking to New York, according to artnet News. Instead, they are opting to stay in their city of origin—Mexico, Brazil, Poland, Indonesia, etc. Not exactly news to most art professionals, but good to see the fact that these so-called peripheries are a big deal to artists acknowledged. [artnet News]

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Thursday Links: Make It So

by Paddy Johnson and Rea McNamara on June 16, 2016

Artnews SA, the Polish Company that briefly owned ARTnews and Art in America, has filed for bankruptcy and will be liquidating all its assets. The bankruptcy was filed just two weeks after Peter Brant assumed all the assets for both publications, and announced that Brant Publications has become their legal owner. [artnet News]
“‘The Present in Drag’ errs by so uniformly investing in the corporate gaze that any radical vision of emancipation from this aesthetic comes off as puritanical. Consumer options are tragically offered as real options. How do we reconcile this corporate violence — which reduces our bodies, wants and needs to data with such cruel effect — with its embodiment by artists, however self-aware?” Karen Archey reviews DIS’s curation of the Berlin Biennale. [Frieze]
Anti-ISIS hacktivists have hit the Internet Archive. The open-access digital library and host of the WayBack Machine were hit with a DDoS attack yesterday because they inadvertently host user-uploaded ISIS propaganda materials. [Motherboard]
Brazilian artist Vik Muniz has a show at Mauritshuis in The Hague showcasing life-sized models of the flip-sides of famous paintings. Expectedly, the details are mundane — ”Mona Lisa” has a written message that says “this way up”, while Matisse’s “Red Studio” is covered in chicken wire. “The back reflects the artist’s studio, it has nails, it has hardware and is always changing. It shows the museum’s role as conservator, too,” says Muniz. [Guardian]
A long-list Gauguin floral still life has been rediscovered in a Connecticut auction house. [Art Newspaper]
Half of the Corcoran art school’s full-time faculty were laid off last month. To put in perspective, out of 19 full-time faculty, only 9 are coming back in the fall.The loss coincides with the school’s class of 2016 graduation ceremony, but also comes at a time of budget cuts, a shrinking student body, and the school’s integration into George Washington University. The latter has become a growing concern for the historical art school’s community, who have felt that the ongoing merger has had a lack of transparency in its proceedings. [Hyperallergic]
Diana Y. Chou has been hired by the San Diego Museum of Art as its new associate curator of East Asian art. Chou has organized museum shows in the United States and Taiwan for the past 15 years, and consulted with the Carnegie when it was reinstalling its Asian art galleries. At the San Diego Museum, she’ll be overseeing a collection containing 7,000 works, organizing shows and being involved with its acquisitions. [Artforum]
Former MoMA film curator Lawrence Kardish weighs in on the institution’s controversial firing of long-time assistant curator of film Sally Berger: “I no longer understand what goes on in my old stomping grounds… Doesn’t a curator have the right to pick and choose what is to be shown under his/her auspices?” Berger’s firing last week was tied with the wrongful cancellation of “Under the Sun”, a documentary about North Korea from February’s Doc Fortnight festival. [Indiewire]
We’ve been looking forward to this all year: it’s Captain Picard Day, so here’s all the Earl Grey recipes you ever needed. [Nerdist]

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Tuesday Links: The End of the World as Routed Through an Aaliyah Video

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on June 14, 2016

Cécile B Evans, “What the Heart Wants” at the Berlin Biennale

In this podcast, Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation discusses keeping artists in New York and the city’s affordability crisis. Confession: I haven’t heard the whole piece, but apparently the foundation is shifting its focus to inequality. [WNYC]

Jason Farago is not a fan of the DIS-curated Berlin Biennale. It’s too sarcastic, it’s offensively aloof in the context of unfolding humanitarian crisis, the organizers seem to have given up faith in the goodness of art in favor of courting LOLs—these all sound like valid criticisms. We haven’t seen the Biennale yet, but it seems as if DIS was more concerned with keeping the curation “on brand” than making sure works didn’t get drowned out in a sea of normcore sameness. Which is a shame, because DIS’s politics and cleverness beyond surface could’ve really shown through with a project on this scale. Still, Farago notes highlights. On Cécile B Evans’ video installation: “Evans imagines the end of the world as routed through an Aaliyah video, in which love itself has been commoditised, and slickness is no escape from psychological or ecological meltdown.” [The Guardian]

Art Basel’s Unlimited section—where work that’s too big for traditional galleries is presented—has a record breaking 88 massive pieces on view this year. It’s curated by Gianni Jetzer of the Hirschorn Museum, and a lot of the work looks pretty boring but very big. A notable exception, Hans Op de Beeck’s concrete “The Collector’s House” is so cool I would live in this installation. [Artsy]

Liste charges a fee to galleries that present work by artists who are more than 40 years old. Its focus remains on youth. Is it any good this year? Anything remarkable about the fair? Impossible to tell from Nate Freeman’s report, which mostly just says it’s retained its youthful spirit. [ARTnews]

Ah, the convoluted web of art, real estate, and bankruptcy. Ace Gallery in Los Angeles is in serious financial straits, paying massive rent on a building that’s become central to their brand identity. But I’m not sure real estate alone is to blame for Ace’s dilemma—friends who have worked with Ace tell me it’s a mess across the board, from rumors about attempting to sell work it didn’t technically own to last-minute pull-outs from art fairs. Ace sounds like it’s been poorly managed on many fronts. [The Art Newspaper]

¡Escandalo! The Clark Art Institute has loaned 28 paintings from the Prado Museum—including work from Titian, Tintoretto, Guercino, Guido Reni, and Peter Paul Rubens— for an exhibition about art the Spanish royal family had to hide from the Catholic Church because it was too sexy. The exhibition is called Splendor, Myth, Vision, (really? That sounds like a New Age self-help book, not an exhibition about secret sexy paintings) and runs through October. [Observer]

Kaleidoscopic GIFs by Anna Taberko. [Colossal]

Bret McCabe reviews Hasan Elahi’s latest show and I really want to see it. Elahi obsessively documents his movements, meals, and minutia as an absurdist critique of the surveillance state. The truly ironic thing about his work, though, is that it actually discloses less than most people’s social media presences. [BmoreArt]

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Wednesday Links: Stay Gold, Maltese Eagle Statue

by Emily Colucci Rea McNamara on June 1, 2016

In a story straight out of The Maltese Falcon, a five million dollar gold and diamond-encrusted eagle sculpture was stolen right out of the hands of its owner Ron Shore in British Columbia. Shore, who also auditioned 11 times for Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, told CNN: “Without the eagle, I have nothing.” With an emerald from the Spanish Atocha shipwreck, the eagle was strangely constructed as a marketing ploy for The World’s Greatest Treasure Hunt, a book series planned to raise money for breast cancer. [CNN]
Artist Darja Bajagić is crying censorship over a decision by Bucharest’s Galeria Nicodim to not show her artwork Bucharest Molly, a fountain depicting a woman wearing jeans that say “Heil Hitler” holding a teddy bear emblazoned with a swastika, in an exhibition on the aesthetics of evil. In a long statement posted to her Tumblr page, Bajagić skewers the gallery’s understanding of the work, exclaiming “your evil act of censorship justifies exactly what it is that Molly is reflecting. Your unwillingness to allow a light to be shone onto a looming darkness gives life to the very darkness you desired to repress.” [ARTnews]
LACMA’s associate curator of contemporary art, Jarrett Gregory, and Eric Shiner, the Warhol Museum’s director, have been appointed curators of the 2017 Armory Show. [Artforum]
An interview with William Villalongo, one of the artists in the Brooklyn Museum’s Disguise: Masks and Global African Art show, elaborates on how European modernists appropriation of African masks became a point of reference for his paper collage masks. “The masquerade is a place of fiction. The viewer’s imagination is an important part of its activation,” he says, believing it is ultimately “a way to think through such historical gestures.” [After Nyne Magazine]
Tate director Nicholas Serota is not a fan of Guggenheim-style global satellite expansions for museums: “a gallery should be fundamentally rooted in its community—it should grow out of that community and reflect that community—and if you parachute in, I think it’s extremely difficult to achieve. You can make a visitor attraction, but it’s very, very difficult to create something that really grows out of the soil.” [The Art Newspaper]
LA’s infamous homeless neighborhood, Skid Row, continues to be mired in rezoning politics and remains a contentious civic issue as the downtown core becomes revitalized but ignores the area’s entrenched poverty issues. Local artist Rosten Woo and activist-performance art group the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) are creating a faux nine-hole golf course in response — which received $50,000 from the Mike Kelley Foundation — to explore the area’s history of zoning, and how the city organizes itself. [Guardian]
Doreen Carvajal profiles the Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art (MIMA), a museum of “culture 2.0” i.e. street art, skateboarding and other urban art, located in Molenbeek, a largely Muslim neighborhood of Brussels. Opened in the wake of the terror attacks in the city, MIMA aims to engage the local community–many of whom feel isolated by Belgian society–including a cultural exchange with a nearby boxing academy. [New York Times]
Invited to a fancy gallery dinner but feeling too riddled with social anxiety to attend? Artnet News presents a series of 11 tips to survive gallery dinners, which seem too general and bland such as “don’t be a schlub” and “don’t flake out.” What about Emily’s go-to strategy–drink too much free wine and blurt out regrettable comments? [Artnet News]
Peter Beard settled his lawsuit with model and artist Natalie White whose upcoming show made AFC’s Must See Events this week. White sued the well-known photographer claiming that she spent her life-savings helping Beard create a series of Polaroid collages with iconic models like Iman. Beard and his wife counter-sued, alleging White plied Beard with booze and drugs to sign a business contract in a nightclub. [New York Observer]
The last time Emily went to a DIS installation, she found herself drinking Red Bull and vodka out of a Starbucks cup shoved into a Croc. This year, DIS curates their “first and only biennial,” the 9th Berlin Biennale. Titled “The Present In Drag,” the collective takes to Artforum to discuss their aesthetic influences and curatorial approach to the Biennale, which will likely involve copious ironic consumer products. [Artforum]

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Fresh New Digs for Aging Independent

by Chris Green on March 4, 2016

The Independent art fair is apparently all grown up and ready to cement its place of privilege in a new Tribeca location. This year’s event space, Spring Studios, is better known for exclusive fashion and Tribeca Film Festival events, but the organizers believe it is just right for a fair that now considers itself to be mature and ambitious. Aging is perhaps a more appropriate characterization here—this year, the formerly new-blood establishment of the Independent seems as though it is content to coast into retirement.

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This Week’s Must-See Art Events: None of Them are Poverty-Themed Raves

by Michael Anthony Farley and Rea McNamara on November 2, 2015

Don’t get us started on that “Bronx is Burning” rave. (That’s for another post.) This week, as many of us are still cleaning off the paint and glitter from last weekend’s Halloween costume, there’s thankfully a mix of screenings, openings and performances to help ease you back into your regular schedule. Tonight, Ben Coonley organizes a group screening of artists’ first “hard-fought” 3D works at Brooklyn’s Microscope. Then there’s the opportunity to shake the spirits of the past, whether it be Tuesday’s Duane Linklater CUNY talk on museum’s colonialist legacies or Wednesday’s opening at Robert Blumenthal of an ambitious installation from Derek Fordjour evoking childhood-era psychic spaces.

Meanwhile, the rest of the week offers heavy fluxus drone (Thursday, Yoshi Wada) and an online journal launch (Friday, Bard’s aCCeSSions). The weekend promises new directions (Saturday, MoMa’s New Photography opening) and guilty pleasures (Michael’s, specifically, with Sunday’s Jessica Stockholder opening at a Greenpoint storefront space).

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The Worst Shows of 2016: What’s the MoMA Björkgate of the Year?

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