- 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]
