Here at Art Fag City we’re all about keeping you abreast on breaking fan pages on Facebook such as that of Kate Bush.  Mostly, of course, this is just an excuse to repost my favorite, Kate Bush video, Army Dreamers.  Via: Wizardishungry twitter.

Max, the late Anthology Film Archives cat, (Photo: Robert Haller)

A special homage to Max, the now deceased venue cat will take place this Saturday at Anthology Film Archives. Passing away September 16th, 2007, Anthology’s press release/obituary reflects on Max’s calm feline demeanor and her strong work ethic over the last 17 years at the film house; Surely she was New York’s most well versed cat on avant-garde film. Saturday’s screenings will include a number of “cat-centric” films by Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, Joyce Wieland, Martha Colburn, and Pola Chapelle in addition to exclusive footage of Max herself! Art Fag City would like to point out Joyce Wieland in particular, a fellow Canadian, and a critical figure in art, avant film making, and ir, cat studies. Max, you will be well missed!

Via: The Reeler

This just in via MAN: A new drilling contract in Utah threatens Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, an emergency email from the artist’s widow, Nancy Holt, informs journalists. A number of pipes and pumps will be laid beneath the water and shore, as well as roads built for oil tank trucks, and cranes for other development needs, all of which promise to severely alter the surrounding environment including Spiral Jetty.

To voice your concerns emails or calls of protest go to Jonathan Jemming 801-537-9023 jjemming@utah.gov. Refer to Application # 8853. The deadline for protest is 7 PM ET today.

Nancy Holt’s letter in full here:

Yesterday I received an urgent email from Lynn DeFreitas, Director of Friends of the Great Salt Lake, telling me of plans for drilling oil in the Salt Lake near Spiral Jetty. See Attachments. The deadline for protest is [today] Wednesday, at 5PM. Of course, DIA has been informed and are meeting about it today.

I have been told by Lynn that the oil wells will not be above the water, but that means some kind of industrial complex of pipes and pumps beneath the water and on the shore. The operation would require roads for oil tank trucks, cranes, pumps etc. which produce noise and will severely alter the wild, natural place.

If you want to send a letter of protest to save the beautiful, natural Utah environment around the Spiral Jetty from oil drilling, the emails or calls of protest go to Jonathan Jemming 801-537-9023 jjemming@utah.gov. Please refer to Application # 8853. Every letter makes a big difference, they do take a lot of notice and know that publicity may follow. Since the Spiral Jetty has global significance, emails from foreign countries would be of special value.

They try to slip these drilling contracts under the radar, that’s why we found out so late, not through notification, but from a watchdog lawyer at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, the group that alerted me to the land leasing for oil and gas near Sun Tunnels last May.

Thank you for your consideration of this serious environmental matter.

Looks like someone’s going to have to update Goethe-Institut’s Wikipedia page to indicate their latest New York project; Ludlow 38, a downtown art gallery with a focus on contemporary art. So much wiki-ing to do so little time!

Aside from the little reported story of incomlete wiki pages found on the web, Goethe-Institut’s newest project curated by Kunstverein Munchen looks very promising. The new satellite space will open its doors to the public February 9th, with the show “Publish or be Damned”, a public library consisting of over 300 international publications assembled by Emily Pethick, Kit Hammonds, and Sarah McCrory. Typically such libraries are rarely equipped to circulate, which tends to be a small gripe of mine, but I guess asking for that defeats the point of an exhibition in that the works displayed need to actually be there. As such, anyone wishing to examine the zines will simply have to do so on site. Publication highlights include critical journals Dot Dot Dot, Copenhagen Free University/Infopool, Metronome, Anarchitektur, Fucking Good Art, Fanzines I’m largely unaware of such as Ziggy, Zowie, Blondiak, Dark Star, Useless, and video and cassette editions including Audio Theory and Audio Arts; radio plays and Independent Record Labels such as Another Album and Junior Aspirin.

The library also includes self-published works by authors, musicians and theorists as well as artists such as Jeremy Deller, Scott King, Pablo Bronstein, Raymond Pettibon, Spartacus Chetwynd, Nils Norman, Stephan Dillemuth, Stephan Willats, Cathy Lomax, Eleanor Brown, Aline Bouvy, Sonia Dermience, Meeuw Muzak and many others. Based on this post, I’m probably most interested in the Pettibon material, but of course the point of going to a library such as this is to discover other work. Given the selection available, I’d say that’s pretty much inevitable.

Sexy! Rhizome relaunched their website today and all without the ill-advised help of Joomla (the Harvestworks Digital Media Center content management system!) The site comes complete with a featured artwork section, a featured portfolio - both of which will hopefully generate a separate page of featured work - though it seems like this doesn’t exist yet. The main community platform has also been upgraded (discussion boards, calendar, opportunities), a move I’m particularly pleased about, because I found this portion of their previous site confusing. I will be posting more thoughts on the subject as I familiarize myself with the new site, but in the mean time, Lauren Cornell, the Executive Director of Rhizome writes about the changes here.

Kalup Linzy, Asshole, mp3

Fresh from the Linzy newsletter, video artist Kalup Linzy announced earlier today the release of his newest single Asshole.  Choice lyrics include asshole, asshole, asshole asshole, and Why do you do this to me? Um, awesome.  Purchase the original or dance version on his website, preview it on myspace.

Half the Internet shut down today when Wizards of the Coast announced the upcoming release of their 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons RPG at GenCon. Witness the above screenshot from Wizards.com and the capture below of the D&D wikipedia entry which has been temporarily closed for editing. Apparently nerds still run the Internet.

The last version of D&D was released 8 years ago, so clearly, this news is enough to induce the above Internet seizure. Having played Dungeons and Dragons all of three times in my life, I can’t pretend I spend much time following wizard.com announcements, but it would seem one of the nicer aspects of the game is the online component. Having pissed off a lot of gamers when they canceled their magazines Dragon and Dungeon in April 2007, they are now attempting to bring back some of that content online. Of course, like all fine American products you have to pay a monthly fee to access the new material.

Originally via: Slashdot

Modern Art Notes confirms LA Observed’s report this morning that the artist Jeremy Blake, is considered missing off New York’s Rockaway Beach. This comes one week after his long time girlfriend Theresa Duncan of Wit of the Staircase killed herself while working on a film in New York. While Duncan showed outward signs of suffering from mental instability on her blog, it should be noted that she did believe that both her and Blake were being stalked.

Also read more on the story at:

Fishbowl LA

Update: Via Modern Art Notes: Blake’s body may have been found.

Petra Cortright, H-o-r-i-z-o-n—-T-r-a-c-k-x/Glitchtttt

Up until about month ago, if you had a Facebook addiction, it was primarily rooted in the interest of finding old high school friends and taking  pleasure in their weight gain.  As someone who was not particularly popular in school and maintains a serious Internet addition, I’m sure it won’t surprise anyone that I didn’t need to find a professional reason to waste all kinds of time on that site.

Increasingly however, I am seeing that site used by heavy Internet users, (publishers and net artists). As far as social networking devices go, I suspect the site will win eventually win out over myspace since it is far more user friendly.  Facebook features all kinds of plugins, developed by users that function well for a day or two before they break (anyone else having problems with delicious?) and provides a newsfeed of friend updates, so you can monitor the activities of people in your network on the site.  What sort of stuff do you learn?  As the title of this posts suggests, typical headlines include, “Petra commented on her own photo” or “Catherine removed retro 80’s from her favorite music”.  Breaking indeed.

However, facebook also provide updates when users write notes, which proves handy for artists who want to notify their friends, and say, people like me about their work.  You can also tag people in these messages, so that they receive additional notification (a perk since the newsfeeds can get a little overwhelming.)

Anyway, all of this is a rather long lead to the point that net artist Petra Cortright has written a note informing Facebook users that she’s uploaded new work.  I don’t have anything overly intellectual to say about the city of glitch past the fact that I like how it looks and find it amusing that the images come from a file titled “actually worthwhile.”  I’m inclined to apply that sentiment not just to H-o-r-i-z-o-n—-T-r-a-c-k-x, but to Facebook as well.