Is the Atlanta art scene shrinking? Not according to some, despite recent gallery closings.
Late-night Googling takes you places. Who knows what I was searching for originally, but I ended up finding it with Jon Ippolito’s “10 Myths of Internet Art”. More than ten years later, some of the myths Ippolito brings up—it’s difficult to sell a website as art, internet art must be online, and net art tends to be about splashy tech—are still in place.
Critics mostly agree that the Punk show at The Met isn’t very good. I’m not a different voice in this choir, but perhaps my tenor might offer a slightly different pitch. This week at The L Magazine I explain why the Met Museum’s “Punk: From Chaos to Couture” fails.
Ai Weiwei will do whatever it takes to get the message out, which includes making a heavy metal video about his three month-long detention.
- The Whitney Museum has a new cheeseball logo. They’ve also redesigned the site. That much, is a considerable improvement. The site however, loads slow. [The Whitney]
- Museums for everybody! Abba gets one, so what the hell, Paula Deen Museum. [LA Times]
- Paul D’Agostino interviews the Bushwick Open Studios [BOS] organizers about what’s in store this year. Most of it reads like PR, but we weren’t aware of BOS’s CinemaSunday programming, so it’s worth a read regardless. Apparently there will be a screening for the “”The Pizzatrope,” a how-to guide for combining early animation techniques, gifs, and pizza.” [The L Mag]
- The IRS is unhappy with Glafira Rosales, the Long Island dealer who sold abstract expressionist paintings many now believe to be fake to Knoedler gallery. Knoedler closed two years ago, when they received their first lawsuit over the authenticity of the paintings. Now Rosales is charged with falsifying tax returns and failing to disclose a foreign bank account to the IRS. [In the Air]
- BREAKING: Complex reports that Pratt’s giving its hundreds of resident cats the boot this week, prompting an outcry from nearly 1700 community cat lovers on Change.org– to no avail. Two cats have been granted amnesty. The hundreds of others will live with the school’s engineer Conrad Milster. Keep the cats. [Change.org, Complex]
- GIF inventor Steve Wilhite used his life time achievement award speech time at the Webby Awards to let the world know he’d like us to pronounce the file format as he intended, “JIF.” Us GIF nerds have known this for years—it’s on the Wikipedia page—but I don’t think even a high-profile speech is going to turn this boat around. “GIF” makes more sense. [Animal]
- After Time Out Chicago axed their full-time art critic, a flurry of criticism arose about how many full-time art critics are actually out there, and whether freelance critics count. Gallerist NY adds to this debate just by simply stating what critic Deborah Solomon stated on WNYC this week, that there are fewer than ten full-time art critics writing for newspapers. Yes, we know this, but many freelancers out there are upset that “full-time art critic” doesn’t refer to online publications or those who write for several. It’s an issue of legitimacy in the eyes of changing media. For that debate, just take a look at the comments section to this piece. [Gallerist NY]
- Greg Allen is no fan of Architecture Firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Hirschhorn design, “The Bubble”. Liz Diller wonders if the museum could be an agent for cultural diplomacy and proceeds to present a structure designed to house expensive events like TED, the WEF, and CFR fora. Why ask the question, if the purpose of the venue won’t ever answer the question. [Greg.org]
- E-book revenue increased by 42% last year. Art publications are still harder to find for my Kindle than your fill-in-the blank bestseller. [The Los Angeles Times]
- Fewer couples are having kids in the states, but they’re making way for more puppies. U-S-A! [The Atlantic]
- Bushwick Open Studios starts next week, and runs from May 31st through June 2nd. Here’s the map of the 587 studios listed so far. [Arts in Bushwick]
- Hennessy Youngman has come out with his second lo-fi mix this year, CVS Bangers Vol. 2. Listen to the mellow 80s tracks you’d hear while filling your cart up with Mac ‘n’ Cheez Whiz, interrupted by a blaring airhorn, then Hennessy-designed ads, then someone saying “Obama”. Just Obama. [Soundcloud via Twitter]
- The Asia Society has hired a new President, Josette Sheeran, vice chair of the World Economic Forum. [The Wall Street Journal]
- The Met just appointed a new curator to its Department of Medieval Art and the Cloisters, C. Griffith Mann, since the Cleveland Museum of Art’s chief curator. He’ll be bumping up current curator Peter Barnet to senior curator of that department. [Cleveland.com]
A will to change is in the air, but it’s against a backdrop of the same-old. At the New Museum, Karen Finley’s live sext paintings challenge an institutional denial of boundary-pushing work, while the Whitney has more shows of Hopper and Hockney. Klaus Biensenbach and The Jogging talk about rising waters (in their own ways), at Hyperallergic and Still House respectively. Plus, a group show of some of art’s most vocal activists addresses failure.
Judd pad. (Image courtesy of Vulture)
- Andrew Rice on Contemporary Artist Damien Hirst’s falling market. Lots of great quotes from Hirst’s former Financial Advisor, Frank Dunphy. [Business Week]
- We learned a lot about Donald Judd, thanks to art critic Jerry Saltz and Architecture Critic Justin Davidson, who’ve made a trip to his restored loft. [Vulture]
- Michael Kimmelman, a former art critic-turned-architecture-critic for the Times brought the Madison Square Garden lease renewal to the forefront in his February column. It’s now May, and the debate still rages. MSG doesn’t want to leave. [Curbed]
- The Committee to Save the NYPL offers a point-by-point rebuttal to the New York Public Library, in the fight to keep the NYPL from demolishing the stacks and sending most of its inventory into offsite storage, for circulation in a Central Library Plan. [SaveNYPL.org]
- It’s an extravagant and permanent move estimated now at over $300 million, and nobody seems to want this. [Times]
- Another good day for the like economy: Yahoo has now officially bought tumblr, in a deal estimated to be worth $1.1 billion. They promised “not to screw it up” like flickr. Worpress’ Matt Mullenweg thinks it was a steal, Forbes’ Peter Cohan says they overpaid. [NPR]
- Facebook’s been getting similar criticism since it bought Instagram last year for $1 billion, and has yet to see a return. [Time]
- Wordpress founder founder Matt Mullenweg already says he’s seeing user backlash against tumblr, says TheVerge: “imports [of individual posts] from Tumblr to WordPress rose from the typical rate of 400-600 per hour to over 72,000.” [TheVerge]
- Seamless and GrubHub have merged. [TheVerge]
- Our twitter is flooding with updates this morning from the #AAM2013, the American Alliance of Museums conference and awards ceremony. Look at @Juliahalperin and @ArielHudes for the bullet points. [#AAM2013]
- Museums are hiring for high-level curatorial positions. [AAM jobs]
Who was Sally Hemings? You could choose a number of titles: the mother of Thomas Jefferson’s children; his wife, Martha Jefferson’s, sister; Martha and Thomas’s slave. Her story is now nearly two centuries old, yet still demanded an answer in 1998, when a DNA test finally confirmed her link to the Jefferson bloodline.
Hemings is the subject of one of two shows at the Studio Museum right now, which both dig up old narratives, and both pull out a very fresh take on identity. The cerebral “American Cypher” by Mendi + Keith Obadike, and the romantic “Stray Light” by David Hartt are worth a trip up to Harlem, just to add their voices to the fray.
You like art. You know nothing about it. Where to start?
How about our beginners art reading list! This list is for all the friends over the years who have asked me what they should read to learn about art and the art world. No one wants to flip through a text book to learn about art. You won’t have to, with these books.
