Finally, a border wall proposal so relatively inexpensive and easy to assemble a Republican could do it. [Dezeen]
Related: the indie video game “Papers, Please” is seeing a surge of interest as of recent weeks, unsurprisingly. The 8-bit game lets users play as a border agent in a dystopian Eastern European nation, rejecting or accepting immigrants based on suspicions they might be a smuggler or terrorist. [Humble Store]
MoMA is protesting Trump’s visa ban with a rehang of its permanent collection. They’ve interrupted the galleries’ usual art-historical arc by replacing a room of Picasso and Matisse works with pieces by artists from countries on the ban list. These include mostly artists from Iran. [The New York Times]
Meanwhile in Mexico, Samah Abdulhamid, a Syrian refugee, was greeted at the airport by a crowd with signs welcoming her to the country, including “Aquí no hay muros” (Here there are no walls). She’s the first female Syrian student to arrive via Proyecto Habesha, which is helping Syrians whose studies have been disrupted by the war attend universities in Mexico. It seems like a really great organization, especially if you’re looking to donate to something making a concrete positive impact now. [Fusion]
I can’t figure out why this Salvador Dalí painting is being described as one of the artist’s “most controversial works”, but it’s going up for auction at Bonhams. It’s an innocent-seeming portrait of his sister, painted as a gift shortly before the two had a falling-out. [Blouin Artinfo]
Ridiculous headline of the day: David Spade is suing Peter Beard, along with his wife and gallerist, over Beard’s failure to authenticate a photograph Spade bought fifteen years ago. [artnet News]
Pretty much all of the gay world just lost whatever respect we had left for Lady Gaga after she somehow managed to perform the least controversial Super Bowl Halftime Show of all time. Seriously, what the fuck? These past few months she had been a such an outspoken Trump opponent and she blew the one opportunity to have “other America” watching? Someone must’ve had a gun to her stylist’s head. [Gay Internet]
Trump is really bad at writing executive orders, but here’s a meme generator that lets you do it for him! [Executive Order]
“The definition of ‘pretension’ is somebody who elevates something that is not worthy of any kind of elevation… Brad does that quite a bit, but nothing he makes is straight-up dumb.” -Paddy Johnson is quoted several times in Adrian Chen’s profile of Brad Troemel, which has to be one of the most thorough biographies of a young artist I’ve read. [The New Yorker]
If only I were in New Orleans right now. If so, I would be petting an alligator (because you can do that there), walking along the edge of the world (because you can do that there, too), and visiting2 Freaky 2 Friday at Pelican Bomb Gallery X (which you still have time to do because the exhibition runs through September 18). The mostly femme and femme-identifying artists in the exhibition all explore images of celebrity in a sometimes critical, sometimes celebratory way that fits in so well with the AFC brand. A note on the exhibition from curator (and friend of AFC) Amanda Brinkman:
I grew up with a British mother and an American father in a small German town with a population fewer than 9000 people. Celebrities were my lingua franca and my guide to living like an American kid in the ’80s—something I was determined to do even halfway across the globe….I eventually threw away my New Kids on the Block sheets, but my interest in celebrities and what they can represent continues today. I’m routinely condescended to by intelligent people who “don’t even own a TV” and see stars as the ultimate waste of time and brainpower. But celebrities can help us theorize the relationship between the surface-level, lowbrow, and easily accessible and the deep, highbrow, and complex in incredibly fruitful ways.
In lieu of buying a last minute plane ticket, I’m posting excerpts from Faith Holland’s 2013 GIF series “Chelsea Manning Fan Art,” part of 2 Freaky 2 Friday. Peace out, y’all—it’s Friday night, so I leave you for the weekend with the now-classic Lady Gaga and Beyoncé video for “Telephone,” from which the GIF takes its lead.
Was Audrey Munson Picabia’s muse “Udnie”? James Bone makes the case in his new book The Curse of Beauty. She was described as “America’s first supermodel” and her likeness still adorns numerous Beaux-Arts buildings in New York City in sculptures. [The Art Newspaper]
In advance of the dreaded 2019-2020 L Train shutdown, StreetEasy compiled a list of neighborhoods for riders who are considering relocating. Apparently they have never heard of the JMZ? Heading to Harlem or Astoria seems a bit drastic compared to just moving a fraction of a mile south. On the up side, the 18 month transit shortage might lower property values, so this could work in the favor of people who want to live and work in some Brooklyn neighborhoods. [Curbed]
Jersey City has painted over a mural by Gary Wynans, which depicted a giant locally-themed Monopoly board. Wynans was approached by developers who asked to have their real estate projects included in the piece, and it drew ire from groups ranging from the police union to neighborhood activists. [NJ.com]
Temporary Art Review is looking at the artist-run scene in Fayetteville, Arkansas all month long. This includes projects such as a backyard art space and a university gallery run by students. The series totally makes me want to visit! [Temporary Art Review]
Washington-based artist Eames Armstrong interviewed Tom Boram about his visual art and interest in noise music. We checked out Boram’s Star Trek-themed work when we went to Maryland Art Place. [BmoreArt]
Performance artist Orlan has been ordered to pay Lady Gaga €20,000 after losing a copyright lawsuit in French court. Orlan was suing the pop star for ripping off her imagery in the “Born This Way” music video. Uh, Orlan had a point! [artnet News]
What is the world coming to? The pizza rat may be a hoax! [Gothamist]
Cait Monro questions whether Saatchi’s all-female show “Champagne Life” is really a step in the right direction. An all female show isn’t a very sophisticated theme for a show, and there is a dirth of female solo shows. (No new ideas here, but I guess it still has be said.) [artnet News]
French artist Orlan has spent decades getting implants on her face for a project she calls “Carnal art”. Now she’s suing Lady Gaga for 31.7 million because she believes Gaga’s video “Born that Way”, steals from her art work. Gaga appears to be wearing facial implants. What a stupid lawsuit. It’s not like the idea of getting a face implant is so unique to Orlan that she deserves a payout. [Page Six]
Speaking of lawsuits, will the Richard Prince lawsuits never end? This week, he’s being sued by Donald Graham, for having appropriated one of his Instagram images and enlarged it. [Hyperallergic]
Marc Spiegler, the director of the Art Basel fairs, thinks galleries need to be more transparent about their pricing—like auction houses. His arguments make sense. Amongst the more compelling, he says that today’s “super-elite art buyers are people who work for their money and are no longer part of a “leisure class” with time to devote to visiting commercial galleries “in Chelsea [New York] or Mayfair” every week.” [The Art Newspaper]
Of the 200 units in downtown Brooklyn’s massive City Point development are 50 market-rate, rent stabilized units. One-bedrooms start at $2,750 and the two-bedrooms start at $4,500. So glad to see the upper middle class won’t be squeezed out of the city. [Curbed]
Ladies and gentleman, the world’s first passenger drone. [Dezeen]
“Watching ‘The Force Awakens,’ I felt as though I was being shown a trailer for the next four movies in the series.” Michael Hiltzik’s Star Wars review is the one I wish I (Michael) had written. This is a great read that hits the nail exactly on the head in regards to pretty much every compliment and complaint one could throw at JJ Abrams and his Disney overlords. Except one: why would anyone “waste” having Lupita Nyong’o by casting her as a voice actress? Didn’t the prequels teach anyone that CGI characters are practically unwatchable? [Los Angeles Times]
After ten years in the making, The National Gallery Singapore is open. The massive museum combines two historic buildings under a glass atrium and rooftop garden and looks great. The program is what’s really interesting here though—the institution will be focused on rotating contemporary Southeast Asian art that’s contextualized with long-running and permanent exhibitions tracing Singapore’s own comparably brief art history, along with touring shows and collaborations with European museums. [Forbes]
Robert Wilson thinks Lady Gaga is a genius and the performance work of contemporaries like Marina Abramović won’t be seen in 50 years: “I don’t think the work is meant to be reproduced.” Setting aside wistfulness for the fleeting ephemerality of the NYC art happenings of yore, is a hilarious anecdote about Wilson’s dinner with Marlene Dietrich, and what we she taught him regarding “slow performing”. [The Guardian]
Michael Miller’s list of subjects he’s heard enough of in 2015. We agree with every item on this list, though I think we’ll be hearing about auctions, Instagram, and art fairs generally in the year to come. [ARTnews]
“Art in 2015 was an academic’s morose porridge of pious intellectual cliches.” God, I love reading British reviews. Here, Jonathan Jones rails against the moralizing (and typically visually dull) nature of do-gooder projects such as gardens or social practice. [The Guardian]
A Wisconsin man was arrested last week after throwing a beer bottle at a female bartender who changed the music in the bar from Black Sabbath to Christmas music. Even more pathetic: it was a bottle of Budweiser. [NBC Philadelphia]
Queen’s University now has the largest collection of Rembrandt paintings in Canada, thanks to the recent donation by alumnus Alfred and Isabel Bader of Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo, worth $80 million. [Toronto Star]
Subway story of the day: NYPD are looking for information on a man with “TEAM USA” tattooed on his forehead who masturbated for 30 minutes on the Manhattan-bound 2 train. [DNAinfo]
Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery and Rawabet Theater, two important nonprofit contemporary art spaces, were shuttered following an unexplained raid from the Egyptian Censorship Authority and other government agencies. Laptops and documents were seized from gallery staff. Blouin Artinfo’s Mostafa Heddaya says this “follows a spate of crackdowns on journalism, dissent, and freedom of expression in Egypt under the rule of military dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.” [Mada Masr via Blouin Artinfo]
Hello funding for the arts in Canada. With Justin Trudeau as the new prime minister, the country may see more funding. He’s promised as much and after years of deep cuts by the conservatives, it’s deeply needed. [Hyperallergic]
Meanwhile, north of the 49th parallel, Canadians are cautiously optimistic about Trudeau’s chance at reversing Harper’s cultural damage, so much so that columnists are giving him free advice and even reading lists on how to do it. [Toronto Star]
Didja know of the day: Dave Eggers is an artist. [Artspace]
Klaus Biesenbach, in presenting the Young Artist Award to Lady Gaga, recalls the time she invited him and 40 other artists on her tour bus after a concert in Berlin and took a tour of all the museums at 2 AM. This was evidence of her generosity and duty as a public figure to contribute positively to society. According to Biesenbach, it’s why she deserves the award. Um, am I missing something? Isn’t this just an example of how being a rock star affords you all kinds of privilege you wouldn’t have otherwise? [ARTnews]
Six years after the death of Jean-Claude, Christo is in the midst of a comeback: he’ll have his first solo show in 50 years at the Craig Starr Gallery next month, and is gearing up for his first post-”Gate” outdoor installation next June at Italy’s Lake Iseo. [New York Times]
DeafWest’s Broadway production of Spring Awakening this season with an all-deaf cast has brought attention to the complicated casting issues disabled theatre artists face, whether it be not getting cast in a role defined as disabled, or even being considered for a role when disability isn’t a factor. [American Theatre]
The British government is campaigning to keep a Rembrandt in the country. The portrait of Catrina Hooghsaert is one of his significant late period works, and culture minister Ed Vaizey has placed a temporary export bar to buy time for a buyer to pony up the £35 million cost. [GOV.UK]
Less than five months into the gig, Batholomew Ryan has resigned as curator at the Warhol Museum. [Washington Post]
Pro tip: if you’re going to steal jewelry from a gallery, you might want to avoid signing the guestbook. [Sun Sentinel]
Chloe Wyma weighs in on Laurie Anderson’s “Habeas Corpus”, and why so many millennials found it problematic: “how could the neo-baroque pyrotechnics of Gharani’s statue, the learned distortions of avant-garde noise music, or the mystical affirmations of Beat poetry speak adequately to the injustice Gharani suffered under US policy?” [Guernica Magazine]
On the woman who dares to marry Jeff Koons. Justine Koons talks about how they met and her new jewelry line. Kind of a snooze fest—nobody bothered to ask her why she and Jeff decided to have six kids. It’s the kind of article you read out of morbid curiosity. [Bazaar]
The dumbest spat and coverage of it in the history of all art-world bullshit: Marina Abramovic is eating her words after complaining that Jay Z failed to make a promised donation to her performance art institute in exchange for her appearance in his “Picasso Baby” video. By the end of the day, artnet News had spoken with Salon 94, who shared the donation number on Jay Z’s donation receipt, and the Marina Abramovic Institute had issued a statement apologizing to both Marina Abramovic and Shawn “Jay Z” Carter for failing to notify Abramovic about the donation. None of the reports even bothered to mention that complaints like this do little more than make potential donors nervous about giving. The only significant question to come out of all this is how many other celebrities she’s charged for their “collaboration.” Did Lady Gaga pay for the privilege of being in her Kickstarter video, too? [The Internet]
Anyone else confused by this sentence? “Originally meant for diarrhea-stricken kids, the electrolyte drink Pedialyte has gained a reputation as a hangover cure—enough that one-third of its buyers are adults.” I rarely see toddlers handing over an AmEx in the checkout line, so I’d sure hope that more than one-third of buyers are adults. [Lifehacker]
In case you need it, here’s a list of all of New York’s public bathrooms. [Brooklyn Magazine]
Peter Burr’s “Cave Exits” might be one of the best installations I’ve seen this year and sadly it was only open for a week. This interview about the his immersive exhibition inspired by “The Zone” from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker gives a little shape to the piece for those who missed it. [Hopes and Fears]
South-African artist and activist Zanele Muholi discusses her current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and the importance of coming out in a country that’s actively hostile to the LGBT community. [DIS Magazine]
The mayor of Ferguson, Missouri has announced that a memorial in the likeness of a dove will be installed in the location where Michael Brown was shot. Over fears of vandalism, the dove will take the form of a plaque rather than a monument. People are awful. [The Hill via the Associated Press]
The Whitney’s old Breuer building is empty, and its new owner, the Met, has a plan to deal with that: keep the building closed and commission a sound walk by John Luther Adams between the two museums! So, I guess the plan doesn’t have anything to do with the museum’s closed doors. [Vulture]
Paper Monument is looking for a new manager. [Paper Monument]
Tweet of the day:
Nobody has money to pay for journalism. But they do have money to pay publicists to promote Red Nose Day. Whatever the hell that is.
Art orgs banding together: Pig Iron Theatre Company, a 20-year-old Philadelphia performance company, will begin a partnership with the University of the Arts to offer an MFA degree in “devised performance.” [The Inquirer]
Looks like real-estate and art tycoon Aby Rosen won’t have his way with the Four Seasons restaurant at the Seagram Building. New York City’s Landmarks Commission has nixed Rosen’s proposal to make changes to the restaurant’s interior. The commissioners did allow Rosen one win: he can put in new carpeting. [The New York Times]
Stay inside, New York. There are many ways to die by snow today. [The Awl]
Attendance at the Frick has more than doubled now that they’re borrowing Vermeer’s “Girl With the Pearl Earring.” Frick staff lets on that over 100,000 visitors have made their way into the collection since the October opening of Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals. [Real Clear Arts]
Can the art world ever recover from the influence of celebrity and entertainment on art? “No way,” remarked one curator at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. “And why would we, with such crossover programming in the upcoming year like Paparzzi! Photographers, Stars, and Artists?”* (*NOT A REAL QUOTE, BUT THIS IS A REAL EXHIBITION.) [e-flux]
Residents and business owners in the LES and and East Village want to keep SantaCon’s drunken hordes out of their streets. Let the protests begin. [Bowery Boogie]
Wow. Larry Gagosian has some harsh words for the new breed of collectors and partiers coming out to Miami. “Two years ago, the audience was a little more interesting from the perspective of the galleries that come here.” [Women’s Wear Daily, Alain Servais]
Bored much? Try cat petting, the computer game. [@PixelatedCowboy]
Ah! LACMA is starting up its Art and Technology program again—the very same one from the 1960s. They sent Claes Oldenburg to do research at Disney; John Chamberlain to Rand Corporation; Richard Serra to Kaiser Steel. Now it’s different; mostly, the program gives office space at the museum. [The New York Times]
Missed this one last week, but the Van Gogh Museum is authorizing 3-D reproductions of Van Gogh’s masterworks. $35,000 for Starry Night, y’all. The first round will debut in January, at the L.A. Art Show. [Los Angeles Times]
Do subjective end-of-year lists not make you angry? Then go ahead, read Complex’s 25 Most Important Artists of 2013 list. Francis Bacon, who just sold the world’s most expensive painting at auction barely scrapes by in the 22nd slot; Robert Indiana is just a nudge ahead of him at 21. Top artists include those who have collaborated with Lady Gaga (#10: Inez and Vinoodh) and Pharrell (#5: Daniel Arsham, #8: JR). Celebrity art collaborations ≠ Most Important Artists. [Complex]
Fiercely Independent. New York art news, reviews and culture commentary. Paddy Johnson, Editorial Director Michael Anthony Farley, Senior Editor Whitney Kimball, IMG MGMT Editor
Contact us at: paddyATartfcity.com
If only I were in New Orleans right now. If so, I would be petting an alligator (because you can do that there), walking along the edge of the world (
