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has written 7 article(s) for AFC.

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Whitney Kimball and Will Brand

Thursday Links: The Venice Round-Up

by Whitney Kimball and Will Brand on May 30, 2013
  • For $2000/night, you can sleep over in Judd’s five-story Soho loft, immersing yourself more deeply in art than ever before. [Curbed] UPDATE: Just kidding. [Gallerist]
  • Following yesterday’s takedown of bikes, and sharing, the Observer kicks off its new column “Isn’t That Rich?,”  a column on uptown social life. This week’s edition: chauffeur-nannies, authored by Mr. Burns: “The New York Post recently wrote about parents who were passing off their classroom volunteer duties onto nannies, much to the dismay of their private schools, or rather, of the other moms, who didn’t fancy selling snickerdoodles alongside hired help at bake sales.” Seriously, this is the best thing I’ve read all week. [Observer]
  • We don’t know how we failed to link this yet, but William Powhida’s new show does a solid job of mocking “conceptually-based” market-tailored art strategies. Between the shipping crate, the neon, the digital color field, he’s basically got the Frieze bases covered. The show’s in LA, but the PDF says it all. [MAN, williampowhida]
  • Kriston Capps at Washington City Paper has an enjoyably thorough report on Hirshhorn Director Richard Koshalek’s resignation. The bigger question: is Washington willing to support large-scale, unabashedly contemporary projects on the National Mall? [City Paper]
  • In disputes over fair wages, British museum workers stage walkouts from the National Gallery, Tate Liverpool, Stonehenge, and several more. [BBC]
  • Carol Vogel’s profile on Massimiliano Gioni tells us little about the Biennale, but once again confirms that, yes, one truly can have it all. [NY Times]
  • The show is based on the “Encyclopedic Palace,” a Futurist model of a 136 foot-tall skyscraper intended to contain all of the knowledge of the world. It reflects the scope of the art world. Gioni “hop[es] every artist in the show comes across as an outsider.” [Sotheby's]
  • HuffPo describes Ai Weiwei’s “Sacred”, a solo show collateral to the Biennale, and its six dioramas of his treatment in prison, and perfect reconstructions of his cell.  He’s also showing “Straight,” 150 tons of straightened rebar scrounged from the ruins of Chinese schools which collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and killed over 5,000 children. [HuffPo]
  • Nationalgalerie Curator Udo Kittelmann isn’t happy with the choice, feeling that Ai Weiwei will overshadow the others. [TAN]
  • Charlotte Higgins observes that Weiwei’s dioramas in coffin-like black boxes, in a church, draw comparisons to self-martyrdom. Curators rush to his defense. [Guardian]
  • The Brits (at least one of them) take more of a shine to Jeremy Deller’s very British pavilion. [Guardian]
  • Twitter’s raving about Sarah Sze’s pavilion, which looks from here like blurry sticks. You just gotta be there. [museumnerd, Daily Beast]
  • Otto Muehl has died. [NY Times]
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The Independent Perfects the Art Übermarket

by Whitney Kimball and Will Brand on March 8, 2013
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In 2010, forty of New York’s up-and-comer galleries sailed downstream to avoid the Armory’s stench of death. Maybe it was the massive crowds or the lack of sunlight that made Thursday night’s opening so grim, but, four iterations later, the Independent has unmistakably assumed the mantle of young establishment.

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Art Fairs: The View From The Top

by Whitney Kimball and Will Brand on December 10, 2012
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What a turd. Reporting from Art Basel Miami Beach, New York Times writer Patricia Cohen gets the exclusively super-rich take on class war. Unsuprisingly, they don’t get what the big deal is.

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Nine Experiences That Are Comparable to Interning at Family Business

by Whitney Kimball and Will Brand on September 25, 2012
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As we found out during a trip to Chelsea this weekend, a Family Business internship entails guarding art on a folding chair, in a roughly 10 x 10 foot closet space. You’re not getting paid, you don’t get a computer, and the gallery doesn’t sell anything, so you’re not exactly making useful contacts. Currently the gallery is packed with instruments, so there’s also a giant gong a few feet from your head which everybody’s invited to hit with a mallet. Sounds just like the “training which would be given in an educational environment” that is legally required of an unpaid internship, hahahahahaha!

But just for laughs, we thought we’d lay out a few academic or training scenarios which Massimiliano Gioni and Maurizio Cattelan had in mind when they tasked a presumably educated young hopeful to guard their art all day.

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Stop Shopping At Sotheby’s

by Whitney Kimball and Will Brand on March 23, 2012
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Things were looking dire on Tuesday morning at Sotheby's during the Chinese fine art auction. A battered troop of about thirty art handlers—accompanied again by the inflatable fat cat crushing a union worker—marched a long semi-circle inside the partitioned protest zone, chanting “No contract, no work, no peace.”

It’s been eight months since these 43 hardworking men and women were put out of their jobs for demanding fair pay and benefits. AFC thinks that’s more than enough. Let’s fix this.

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The AFCRPAAaA* Readers’ Choice Nominees Are Announced!

by Whitney Kimball and Will Brand on February 16, 2012
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Yesterday, we closed the readers’ voting page for AFC’s Rob Pruitt Awards. The results? Not one joke entry was submitted under “Best Genitals.” Hrag Vartanian and Jerry Saltz were nominated for virtually every category. Immediately after the voting page went live, Will Brand’s name mysteriously appeared once each under the “Best Genitals” and “Most Powerful” categories. And it became abundantly clear that nobody can spell; “vrag hartanian”, “rovanian”, “herag”, and “hrog” were all nominated.

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