AFC Editor-in-Chief Will Brand is a Brooklyn-based writer, programmer, and artist, who joined Art Fag City in the fall of 2010 after finishing his MSc in Art History at the University of Edinburgh. His main interests lie in net art and criticism, but he does a bit of everything around a blog (a sad consequence of web development skills). He’s also written for The L and CityArts, and his work has been republished in Junk Jet and on The Creators Project.
Ai Weiwei told the Guardian yesterday that the Chinese government is closing down his company, Fake Cultural Development, for failing to meet “annual registration requirements.” Ai is using the occasion to claim victory over his tax case, since the roughly $2.4 million fine was levied on the firm, rather than the artist personally; we don’t have an in-house Chinese liability law expert, but that sounds good to us. He still can’t travel. [Guardian]
Tyler Green’s reporting from ArtPrize is excellent and spot-on. [Modern Art Notes]
According to Brian Boucher at Art in America, Merchandise Mart has put the Armory Show, Volta, and Art Platform Los Angeles up for sale. We say: Good. [Art in America]
Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the LA Times, doesn’t like the new Stedelijk Museum building. [Los Angeles Times]
Farhad Manjoo’s opinion piece on the evils of pagination got a lot of ‘Yup’s from us. [Slate]
The 2012 MacArthur Fellows have been announced. The ones you’ve heard of: photographers An-My Lê and Uta Barth. [Los Angeles Times]
Apparently Google Street View’s mapping the West Bank now. [+972]
This week at the L Magazine, I find my center and spread the gospel. There’s some net art out there that talks more about the soul than about the iPhone. I call it good.
This week at The L Magazine, I go to bat for Claire Bishop’s much-maligned Artforum essay,”Digital Divide”. Did she forget about the existence of every net artist? Did she not notice she’d written a sentence specifically excluding the art she was looking for? No. You just can’t read good.
This week at the L Magazine, I review “Ghosts in the Machine,” an exhibition spanning twenty-five years of machine-related art, from outsider art to Op art to sci-fi.
This is all the information we have: at a hospital fundraiser in Memphis Monday night, former President George W. Bush mentioned his new hobby, oil painting. He told the crowd he’s “kinda stuck” to painting dogs. Tragically, there are no pictures. [The Daily Beast]
Relatedly, we’ll totally pay you if you find pictures of George W. Bush’s dog paintings. [Me]
Ben Davis looks at the rhetoric of the LA MOCA situation in light of both the institution’s history and our recent economic past. His appraisal is one of the best things we’ve seen this week. [ArtINFO]
The Chinese government has arrested two senior art handlers in Beijing for allegedly undervaluing works at customs, and has not yet set a trial date. The Times has the story, and it’s good. [NY Times]
Souvenir shops across London are filling up with Olympics-related junk. [Gagosian]
The walls of the academy stand firm: Alec Soth got rejected from the Minnesota State Fair. [Tumblr]
This week at The L Magazine, I wonder what will happen to indescribable art in an age of tags. A sample of that wondering, and a single unit of art, within.
While I had YouTube set to Denise René Commemorative Mode last night, I came across this 1965 CBS documentary about MoMA’s Op Art group show, The Responsive Eye. This isn’t Morley Safer’s CBS; as Greg Allen points out, this comes from a time when CBS’s founder was MoMA’s president, so this is actually an informative, considered piece of television. It moves smoothly from talking with people on the street to talking with Responsive Eye curator William C. Seitz, and gets people to say an awful lot of things that are still true today.
We love Julia Halperin’s piece on Avenues, a new K-12 private school opening in Chelsea this fall, even though the content scares us slightly. The school will have a focus on contemporary art; among the amenities are a private, growing art collection, visits from working artists, printmaking facilities at Pace Prints and, most importantly, iPads for all. In the words of its founder, “This is going to be the most important new school ever opened, anywhere in the world.” [BLOUIN BLOUIN, OH NO, ME GOTTA GO, AYE-YI-YI-YI]
Netartnet.net is artnet for net art, and that’s a fantastic thing to have. We liked it so much we bookmarked it twice. [Netartnet.net]
Sam Taylor-Wood and Yoko Ono met thanks to a film Taylor-Wood directed about the adolescent John Lennon, and found they had a lot in common. Taylor-Wood tells a story of an American gallerist who questioned the merit of her work based on the fact that she has four children. Everyone is rightly aghast. [The Guardian]
We just came across this recording of LBJ requesting more room in his pants “down where the nuts hang”. It’s in excruciating detail. [Wonkette]
Hat-tip to Patrick Gantert for directing us to this Flash explosion of Christianity. Best worst website ever. [Evangel Cathedral]
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
