From the category archives:

The L Magazine

Art Fag City at The L Magazine: History’s Fakest Photos

by Will Brand on November 7, 2012
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Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop, now up at the Met, has obvious appeal. It’s the first major exhibition to examine manipulated photography, and manipulated photography—and learning to spot it—is fascinating to anyone with a pulse. To be honest, I didn’t think the exhibition could possibly come through on the promise of the topic. Curator Mia Fineman, though, has created an exhibition that manages to give a comprehensive history of manipulation, cast doubt over photography’s potential for authenticity, and provoke and reward close looking. You should go, and you should bring your mom, because she’ll get it too.

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Art Fag City at The L Magazine: Regarding Regarding Warhol: It Sucks!

by Paddy Johnson on October 25, 2012
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What’s better for cocktail party conversation: a trip to the The Metropolitan Museum to see the exhibition or a trip to a couple out-of-the-way shows you might actually like? I did both recently; this week, we’ll focus on the Met—because high-profile flops are generally great for party chatter.

Aside from The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl, basically every critic in the city has panned Regarding Warhol. That’s for good reason. Curators Mark Rosenthal, Marla Prather, Ian Alteveer, and Rebecca Lowery have assembled a conceptually empty show around the idea that Warhol has influenced the art world’s biggest stars—especially the long list of them included in this show.

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Art Fag City at The L Magazine: Cybersquatting For Fame

by Will Brand on October 24, 2012
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This spring, wandering around the mini sculpture park at Frieze New York, I noticed a tiny canvas propped against the back of one of the expensive steel cubes. I don’t remember what was painted on it—based on that, I’ll guess geometric abstraction—but the attached business card indicated it was the work of some not-yet-famous artist seeking a bit of free publicity. I liked the spirit of the thing, but I still had work to do, and I figured walking around an art fair with a canvas under one arm wouldn’t please security. Still, there’s some wisdom in bringing your art to collectors, rather than waiting for them to come to you.

That’s something of the thinking of La Fin du Monde, an online show curated by Julien Levesque and Caroline Delieutraz up now at LaFIAC.com. The exhibition venue is a cybersquat, established in 2010, intended to catch visitors looking for FIAC, the major Paris-based art fair this weekend. Instead of the fair, they’ll find a clever, fairly encyclopedic exhibition of recent net art, ranging from established continental artists like Mouchette and Systaime to relatively fresh faces like Emilie Gervais and Sarah Weis.

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Art Fag City at The L Magazine: From Russia with Exasperation

by Paddy Johnson on October 10, 2012
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It’s possible, I have learned, to travel thousands of miles to be introduced to a burgeoning art scene only to return unsure if you’ve learned anything at all. I flew to Moscow recently to speak at Art and Reality, a conference that this year focused on curation. The Petr Konchalovsky Foundation runs the event, and as long as that’s the case, I don’t recommend anyone make the trip.

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Art Fag City at The L Magazine: This Week’s Must See Events: Will Brand Talks at Muse Fuse!

by Paddy Johnson on October 9, 2012
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In this week’s event recommendations at The L Magazine, we suggest you go see Will Brand’s lecture tomorrow night at Muse Fuse. There’s some other crap, too—for the three people still interested in talking about the New Aesthetic there’s a talk at the New Museum—but you gotta click through to read about that. Here at AFC, we love Will Brand so much, we’re willing to dedicate an entire post just to promoting his activities.

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Art Fag City at the L Magazine: What’s the Point of a Bad Review?

by Will Brand on October 4, 2012
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This week at the L Magazine, I wonder why we bother. Most art’s crap, and everybody knows it; can a case be made for the bad review?

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Art Fag City at The L Magazine: This Week’s Must-See Art Events and Openings

by Whitney Kimball on October 2, 2012
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This week at The L Magazine we stop talking about GO and start talking about anything else. We found a few art shows to go to and well, some events too. You can thank The New Yorker Festival for that.

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Art Fag City at The L Magazine: On the Total Vacuity of Richard Phillips

by Art Fag City on September 26, 2012
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Poor Richard Phillips. When Marcel Duchamp first dragged that toilet into the gallery, no one knew it was art. Now, 100 years later, we don’t recognize Phillips’s photorealist paintings of female celebrities as the avant-garde trailblazers they really are!

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This Week’s Must-See Art Events at the L Mag

by Whitney Kimball on September 24, 2012
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This week’s dive into event listings yielded a trove of art events so glorious that 900 words could not contain them. The Art Book Fair and the Dumbo Arts Fest are just a few of this week’s gems. Whether you’re painting this week or trying to hack the mainframe, we’ve got an art event for that.

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