- Surprise, surprise: Queens is the new Bushwick. [via Artinfo, WSJ]
- Smell art: the final frontier? [Hyperallergic]
- Yes. The French ministry of culture acknowledges perfumery as art [via Hyperallergic tweet: graindemusc.blogspot.com]
- Upper East Side art dealer Robert Scott Cook of Cook Fine Art faces up to 20 years in prison. The 62-year-old was charged with $4 million fraud after selling 16 works by Renoir, Matisse, and Picasso without telling the owner or giving him the proceeds. [via Artinfo, WSJ]
- We just almost got hit by an asteroid. [Gizmodo]
- Because of Nazis, Twitter will now censor tweets by country. [Slate]
- It was inevitable: now there’s a shit art world people say. [Creativetime]
Marginalized culture loves to watch the mainstream played out on its own terms — to make itself visible within the imagery that bombards us. It was fitting, then, that last night’s screening of seven videos by upcoming Whitney Biennial artist and longtime documenter of queer culture, Charles Atlas, took place on a small screen in the empty nave of the Judson Memorial Church.
The Outsider Art Fair, one of the most high-profile annual exhibitions of folk and self-taught artists, will be celebrating its twentieth anniversary this weekend. The fair has long been a hotbed for presenting interesting outsider art from around the world and trends within the field, and from the looks of the schedule, this year’s fair – which opens this Friday, January 27, and runs through Sunday the 29th – will be no exception.
There’s nothing immediately offensive about the premise of Ian Cheney’s new documentary, The City Dark. Living in New York, I can believe that Cheney, an amateur astronomer since his teenage years in Maine, might miss seeing the stars at night, and feel deprived. When he attempts to stretch that wistfulness into an authoritative documentary, however, the results are less than convincing.
- It’s Monday. The holidays are over. Spring is a long way off. The weather’s crappy. Republican voters can’t pick a favorite between an unrepentant adulterer, an outspoken homophobe, and a careerist creep. You need something to lift your spirits. Voila: the Hall and Oates Hotline. [Gizmodo]
- Two people have completed the Damien Hirst spot challenge. Hirst, an occasional painter sent to punish humanity for its hubris, offered a free artwork to anyone checking in at all 11 Gagosian locations worldwide during his current mega-exhibition. One of the two - Jeff Chu, an editor at Fast Company – did it quietly, with a few scattered Twitter reports; the other – Valentine Uhovski, who Kyle Chayka described as a “crypto-socialite” – extensively blogged the entire trip, during which he met Damien Hirst and apparently wore a Damien Hirst t-shirt for like a week straight. We’re suspicious.
- Police investigating the theft of two nerdy works of art stolen from a gallery in Olympia, Washington speculate that the would-be thieves were, themselves, nerds. Gallery owner Jo Gallaugher says the works were admired mostly by men in their 20s, and the rappelling-from-a-skylight technique definitely has a Mission: Impossible vibe. [Olympian]
- Having mostly found themselves on the receiving end of the art repatriation game, Italy is learning to pay it forward. On his first trip to Libya since the fall of Gadhafi, Prime Minister Mario Monti, in a show of goodwill, brought with him a 2,000-year-old statue that had been stolen in the 1960s. What a nice fellow. [Sacramento Bee]
As it debuts at Sundance this weekend, Alison Klayman’s “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” is being pre-emptively treated by critics as a highlight of the festival. We take a sneak peek at the documentary, which shadowed Ai for years leading up to his detention.
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During last week’s Occupy Museums protest at MoMA, a red and black banner was suspended by the crowd on the fifth floor landing into the museum’s atrium. Security quickly confiscated it, and has yet to return the piece. As Occupy Museums states, institutions nationwide are negotiating with OWS art groups to acquire archival materials, so in an open letter to MoMA, OM has declared terms for the artwork’s acquisition.
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