By now, we have a fairly good handle on New York art stars, but we hear less about the people who love them. In two years of writing for AFC, I’ve owed my art-viewing as much to artists as I have to devoted curators, gallerists, and writers working diligently behind the scenes, knee-deep with the rest of us.
Who are these unsung heroes of the art world? I asked leaders of various emerging art communities for their recommendations, and gathered a series of interviews. Today we talk to Deana Haggag and Catherine Akins, Libby Rosof an Roberta Fallon, Tom Weinrich, Alex Ebstein and Seth Adelsberger, and Rod Malin.
You’d think a post about Instagram would lead one beyond a handful of top art advisers. For Gallerist, this is not the case. Gallerist believes “the art world” has an Instagram obsession and seeks to prove this point by investigating whether deals occur thanks to the service. The whole feature hinges on dealer Dick Richter’s Dick Richter Gallery, an art gallery that sells secondary market art on an iphone, and collector and advisor Nino Mier, who has commented on Richter’s Instagram page.
- White Men Wearing Google Glass. [Tumblr, via Jennifer Chan)
- Thanks to @carla_gannis for this “music that makes you dumb,” a list of schools, followed by their corresponding SAT scores and favorite bands, from Beethoven to Lil Wayne. [musicthatmakesyoudumb]
- In resources: Here’s how to identify seats with power outlets on your flight. [SeatGuru]
- Felix Salmon on the tragedy of Cooper Union. As he tells it, President Jamshed Bharucha is more concerned with global brand-building than he is Peter Cooper’s vision. It hurts to read this story. [Felix Salmon]
- Public disgust and protests by the Hopi people did nothing to stop Paris’ Druout auction house from making record-breaking sales on sacred Hopi objects and artifacts. It’s one of three such recent auctions in Paris. [TAN]
- AFC’s hood gets a new gallery, The Bishop, thanks to two Pratt grad students. [DNAInfo]
Internet Archive will be accepting applications for week-long Tumblr residencies through June 1st. In an facebook conversation transcribed to Alt Crit, artist Nicholas O’Brien says he thinks the platform homogenizes aesthetic for the sake of individual “curatorial sensibilities”. Internet Archive’s Ian Aleksander Adams disagrees.
By now, we have a fairly good handle on New York art stars, but we hear less about the people who love them. In two years of writing for AFC, I’ve owed my art-viewing as much to artists as I have to devoted curators, gallerists, and writers working diligently behind the scenes, knee-deep with the rest of us.
Who are these unsung heroes of the art world? I asked leaders of various emerging art communities for their recommendations, and gathered a series of interviews. The Best of Us, for the Rest of Us.
- So, the New Museum is hosting a residency program for the NEA 4. It’s hard to pin down what, exactly, this residency will look like; from what we know so far, all four artists’ projects will be concerned with how to fund performance art. Sadly, Karen Finley’s project shows how to do that, but only by getting away from performance altogether. In “Sext Me if You Can”, Finley will ask audience members to send her sexts, which she’ll then make into paintings to sell at the New Museum. Here’s my preliminary review: Not brilliant. [New Museum]
- Latvia just opened the Mark Rothko Center. Pro: This is the first time any Rothko paintings have made their way to Eastern Europe. Con: The museum only has six of them. [Financial Times]
- The Saudi conceptual artist Abdulnasser Gharem plans to set up the Arab state’s first artist-run foundation in Riyadh. [The Art Newspaper]
- Women: shitting at the workplace should feel empowering. It’s okay to take a dump in a stall. [New York Mag]
- Richard Prince made a composite of all of Jerry Seinfeld’s girlfriends. [Animal]
- The planned alliance of Philadelphia’s rare-book collectors’ mecca, the Rosenbach Museum and Library, with the Free Library of Philadelphia could mean greater access to literary treasures. The editorial here suggests the merger will be less messy than the Barnes move. [Philly.com]
- There’s a war brewing with literary critics, and it’s because, no surprise here, book lovers don’t always get bloggers. Literary critics are whining about The New York Times Book Review because the old school publication’s new editor Pamela Paul has “no writerly or literary credentials”. That’s not exactly true, but that doesn’t stop The Guardian’s Michael Wolff from deriding Paul for working “two years as a blogger at the Huffington Post, which, it doesn’t seem entirely churlish to point out, is not a job.” Unfortunately, that’s the best he can come up with. [The Guardian]
- Canada’s National Film Board gets props from The New Yorker blog for supporting radical filmmaking. [The New Yorker]
- A recent New Yorker piece on Depression journalism has an unnamed New York Times editor calling poor people losers, according to ex-Times writer Charlie LeDuff. [The New Yorker, behind the paywall]
- The oil company Shell bankrolled an eight-year scientific analysis of van Gogh’s true palette. It reveals that his colors were originally more naturalistic. [The New York Times]
A tidal energy sweeps the art world! Pruitt-Early officially ends it long withdrawal from New York, in a series of retrospective shows; Jack Ferver fans worship at the Abrons Arts Center; the New Museum brainstorms how to monetize; PS1 brainstorms how to fix the Rockaways.
- A tumblr dedicated to shots of art being installed is way better than it sounds. [installor.tumblr.com]
- A rather disturbing Teddy Bear operation. [Ze Frank, Youtube]
- Transart, the Unschool Art School is promising a debt-free MFA on re-title.com. That claim is misleading though: What they actually offer is a “debt-free” payment plan. [Transart]
- Statue of Liberty gets facial recognition software to detect people’s race from a distance. The company that installs this is literally called “Total Recall.” [Slate]
- Weather is once again blamed for bursting Paul McCarthy’s giant inflatable dogshit sculpture, the latest in a series of shitty mishaps for this work. :/ [GalleristNY]
- Creative Time gets an ad in the form of a feature on Anne Pasternak in the NYTimes Style section. It’s for their upcoming benefit this Tuesday. [NYTimes]
- Who green lighted this New York Times fluff piece on the gender disparity in art collecting? Judith H. Dobrzynski surmises that, while it’s tempting to blame the high proportion of bigtime male collectors on the distribution of wealth, men make the big purchases, loudly, because of the “hunting instinct.” (As proof of women being quieter, she points to Alice Walton’s not naming the Crystal Bridges Museum after herself…unlike, say, Peggy Guggenheim? Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney?) This is anecdotal, but the flea market has no such gender lines. Men also have more money. [NYTimes]
- Try proving you’re a human now. [Crapcha]
Rhizome’s Seven on Seven is, by definition, a crap shoot. The conference runs with the basic premise that by pairing seven technologists with seven artists and sticking them in a room together for 24 hours, a few creative sparks might fly. The following day, Rhizome hosts a six hour long conference in which the pairs are given 30 minutes each to present their collaborative work. The results are predictably mixed. Some projects fail, many have potential, but almost none amount to anything at all. Acknowledging this, Seven on Seven Moderator John Michael Boling quickly conceded during his opening remarks that “the main deliverable here is conversation.”
People are not tired of hearing about Painter George W. Bush. In an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition about the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, NPR correspondent David Greene strayed from politics to ask a burning question: How did the 43rd president start painting? The art portion of the interview starts at the 3:07 mark, but for those who prefer to read it about it, we’ve also transcribed the interview for you.
