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Monday Links: Giant Video Hitler, Clown Art, Denver Airport Conspiracies, and Syria’s Westeros Tourism

by Michael Anthony Farley on October 3, 2016

Brian Belott.

As part of the “Berlin Leuchtet” light art festival, the collective RE:SORB decided to project a giant talking Hitler face, Blade-Runner-geisha-billboard style, onto the side of a building. Apparently people were so freaked out a man actually called the police. [RT]

And in other “insane dictators/questionable A.V. decisions” news, the Assad regime is trying to lure tourists to Aleppo with video ads featuring the Game of Thrones theme song. You would think the Syrian government would want to distance itself from references to a drawn-out, convoluted civil war with a byzantine cast of characters no one can follow featuring Medieval-style religious cults, beheadings, and rape. I’m not sure how many tourists this tactic is going to lure. Maybe Gary Johnson? [CNN]

“I believe that our world is very open to clowns: [Jeff] Koons is a clown. [Mike] Kelley’s a clown. Duchamp is a clown. Joe Bradley is a clown.” Brian Belott on absurdism. The artist has lit his hair on fire for YouTube and glued rocks to a calculator. There’s also an anecdote in here that explains why perishable paintings are a kinda terrible idea. [ARTnews]

The huge Denver International Airport is pretty weird, in part because it’s full of creepy public art about the apocalypse and mosaics of genetically modified STD viruses. This has lead to plenty of conspiracy theories involving underground bunkers, the New World Order, and aliens. Rather than attempt PR damage control, Heather Kaufman, the airport’s director of Arts and Public Events, is embracing the airport’s bizarre reputation and hosting a series of screenings, exhibitions, and other events inspired by DIA conspiracy theories. This is the coolest public art story ever. [Westword]

A British reality tv show might have just uncovered a forgotten Raphael. [artnet News]

Matt Furie, the guy who first created “Pepe the Frog,” discusses the character’s origins and how it feels to have your artwork become “the new swastika.” Man, the internet is terrible. [The Creators Project]

Galeria Millan’s new annex in São Paulo is so cool. The gallery’s facade comprises just sliding doors, so the white-box exhibition spaces open to the street and a small courtyard. [Dezeen]

Isaac Kaplan looks at actions before-and-after earthquakes in Haiti, Italy, and beyond in regards to preserving cultural heritage such as art and architecture. [Artsy]

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Tuesday Links: Tiara-Clad Curator Bites Airline Passenger, Rich People Do Other Crazy Art Things

by Michael Anthony Farley on February 23, 2016

Shi Xinning, “Duchamp Retrospective Exhibition in China” now on view at Hong Kong’s M+

Art collective Meow Wolf has convinced investors, including Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, to help them acquire and transform a Santa Fe bowling alley. When it opens, the space will be a psychedelic Victorian interior with maze-like secret passageways to sci-fi landscapes. It sounds insane. [Los Angeles Times]

At LA’s new Broad Museum, all of the floor staff receive 40 hours of training to become “Visitors Services Associates”. That means the people taking your ticket or guarding the artworks are also paid to talk to you about the art, like a docent. I’m not sure if this sounds great or super annoying. [NPR]

M+, Hong Kong’s newest contemporary art museum, is pretty ballsy. The institution is hosting a pre-opening exhibition entitled Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art that sounds as if it’s curated to piss off mainland censors—showing everything from artwork about Tiananmen Square to sculptures by persona non grata Ai Weiwei. Although the former British colony enjoys different freedoms from the rest of China, Beijing has been cracking down on dissidents. This is going to be a culture war battle to watch. [The Guardian]

DIA’s new director Jessica Morgan sounds awesome. The institution is back to showing artwork in NYC after she scrapped multi-year renovation plans, and more importantly, she’s a curator artists respect and like working with. [Vogue]

In other glamorous curator news, Stacy Engman has been accused of assaulting a fellow passenger on a flight from Istanbul to New York, where she was reportedly wearing a tiara and bit the other woman. Where’s the Vogue photoshoot for this? [artnet News]

Apparently Ken Griffin dropped $500 million on paintings by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning before the market cooled off. This would be a record for a private sale. [The Telegraph]

The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts will be free for over a month as a gesture of goodwill following the mass shooting in the area. [mlive]

Thomas Schütte is designing and building his own museum to show and house his own work. [artnet News]

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This Week’s Must-See Events: Butch Queens and Dykes in Brooklyn, Regular Queens has Everything Else

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on September 21, 2015

Summer is drawing to a close, so mark its passing with Andrea McGinty’s Life’s a Beach!!! at Beverly’s tomorrow night. And although the Rockaways won’t be in season for much longer, the rest of Queens is heating up. Witness the comedienne Adrienne Truscott taking off her pants to take on rape culture in Long Island City on Wednesday night. Thursday, thingNY’s apocalyptic opera opens at the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, along with the exhibition Surface Matters, though we recommend saving the performance for Sunday, when there’s less stuff happening. The borough’s New York Hall of Science is also hosting the World Maker Faire (which actually has programming all week). It seems like there’s virtually no reason to ever leave Queens. It does suggest, though, that art loving New Yorkers may soon need to invest in a car to get to all these places. For anyone in the market, we hear the 2010 Jeff Koons BMW art car doesn’t suck.

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Tuesday Links: Apocalypse News Segments

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on January 6, 2015

Screenshot from Ted Turner’s apocalypse video

Could this be the year that the market and institutional support for net art finally gets off the ground? Is there an end in sight for bad Instagram? And what fresh shit will Stefan Simchowitz stir this year? Paddy Johnson’s predictions for the digital art world in 2015. [artnet News]
Reusable art handler bags might not seem very sexy, but their model is a total beefcake. [Artstrong]
The National Portrait Gallery appoints Nicholas Cullinan as its director. [Guardian]
Artist Worthy turns (net) artists into clickbait. [Artist Worthy]
Ah, an actually wonderful read to start your day: a brief history of wit, from Alexander Pope to Stephen Fry. So it’s a very Brit perspective. [Commentary]
Forbes 30 under 30 media list is out and 18 out of 30 people featured are women. That’s a good ratio. [Forbes]
In important Canadian news, team Canada took the world Junior Hockey gold medal yesterday in a 5-4 win over Russia in Toronto. JOY!!!! [The Toronto Star]
The gay tourism company Quiiky offers a tour of art at the Vatican, like Michelangelos, through a squarely gay lens. Will the Pope get down with this? The connection’s a stretch, but a nice overview of the radically changing attitudes over the years. [Guardian]
All aboard the hangover bus, the new NYC bus that offers IV drips and bananas at a VIP price. But how do you get to the bus?? [Village Voice]
The Detroit Institute of the Arts has reached its fundraising goal of $100 million, a sum which will save its collection from the auction block, and go towards refilling the city’s bankrupted pension funds. [The Detroit Free Press]
Sexism everywhere, this time in economics. “Today, women in economics face a Catch-22, where speaking up can easily make them look like a shrew, while not speaking up robs them of legitimate power.” Truism in all fields, except maybe performance art. [Quartz]
34 years ago, CNN made a video to be played on the channel in case of the apocalypse. [Jalopnik]
A slightly nobler version than the Onion’s imagining of apocalypse news. Either way, there will still be news. [The Onion]
Baltimore-based artists and collectives, the Contemporary is launching the Grit Fund this year; they’ll be giving out individual grants ranging from $1,000 to $6,000. [The Contemporary]

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Monday Links: The Most Relevant Art Publication in the History of Ever

by Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball on November 10, 2014

Joan Jonas, “After Mirage” at The Independent

Martha Schwendener calls the Independent, an art fair, exhibition hybrid a welcome mutation. [The New York Times]
Jerry Saltz gives the Independent fair a reserved thumbs up. A few picks from him (though as of today the fair is an exhibition only.) [Vulture]
Perhaps a more kid-friendly Snapchat, Boop is a new app which allows you to send self-destructing animated messages. They’re basically a slideshow of animated emojis. Sponsored Boops are also possible. Still, fun! [Tech Crunch]
Obama calls for net neutrality. He wants the Internet to be classified as a basic utility, which service providers can’t block and filter at will. “The Internet has been one of the greatest gifts our economy — and our society — has ever known,” he writes. [The White House, via Tech Crunch]
In Denmark, Jihadists are offered counseling and jobs. [The Toronto Star]
Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed Al-Thani of Qatar, one of the world’s top collectors, has died suddenly at the age of 48 of natural causes. [The Art Newspaper]
Judge Steven W. Rhodes approved Detroit’s bankruptcy plan, now known as “the grand bargain”, thus saving the Detroit Institute of Art from certain pillage. The bargain will provide money to save public workers’ pensions, and the museum will now be owned and protected by an independent charitable trust (as opposed to being owned by the city). [The New York Times]
Phong Bui sucks off Walter Robinson on the Brooklyn Rail. (We like Robinson too, but this interview is absurd.) In the 1970s, Robinson was the co-editor and publisher of Art-Rite, a newsprint magazine distributed by Soho galleries. We’d never heard of it, but it was possibly the most relevant art publication ever printed. Congratulations, Walter! [The Brooklyn Rail]

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This Week’s Must-see Art Events: Get Your Ass to This Contemporary Fluxus Theater Event

by Corinna Kirsch and Whitney Kimball on November 3, 2014

And plenty of other talks, fairs, and openings in which you can take your ass.

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Monday Links: Get Your Pumpkin Lovin’ On

by Paddy Johnson and Corinna Kirsch on September 8, 2014

Winter is coming. pic.twitter.com/kYUECkJ2HP

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) September 7, 2014

Not impressive: The “chola” look has made it onto the runways, supposedly. The first image in this profile looks like the model has a granddad’s greasy combover. [BlackBook]
Soon Twitter will be for shopping. Today, the company announced a “buy” button for its mobile users. [TechCrunch]
Ball point pen drawings of the Speaker of the House, John Boehner. [Speaker of the House]
Political debate continues to be moronic. Last week, the hosts of a web show called “PolitiChicks” appeared on Fox and Friends to encourage women to free themselves from the shackles of old feminism. Old feminism did little more than sexualize women, whereas this new feminism, they claim, allows women to be feminine. As God intended. Apparently that means “less government in their lives” and the love of “real men.” Most of what gets said makes little to no sense. [Talking Points Memo]
Another critic praises the Carl Andre show at DIA: Beacon. This happens to be exceptional because Andre has been “relatively undersung” and his entire output has been “repressed in American museums.” Compared to Donald Judd, maybe, but most other artists? Nah. [Artforum]
In 1988 German musician Holger Hiller produced different sounds from every item in a room, and collaged them together to make the song Ohi Ho Bang Bang. This is the video. [YouTube]
Cao Fei’s latest film “La Town” channels film noir, Mattel toys, Tim Burton, and features a Santa Claus with a full set of reindeer. Watch the trailer: it looks bizarrely splendid. [Lombard Freid]
Lady Gaga and Jeff Koons are friends. [Page Six]
Martine Rothblatt is the highest paid female CEO in America. She is the 59-year-old founder of United Therapeutics, a transexual, and the subject of a New York Magazine profile. [New York Magazine]
This cat is not a fan of strawberries. [@9GAG Gifs]

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Wednesday Links: Drones and Domino’s

by The AFC Staff on July 23, 2014

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YouTube video of a drone delivering domino’s.

Drones: Now delivering pizza. What else will we think of doing with our military technology? [GOOD]
Despite wars flaring up in the Middle East, ex-Mayor Bloomberg tells everyone to calm down. He’s taking an El Al flight to Tel Aviv, just to protest the FAA’s decision not to let U.S. flights in or out of the country. GOOD. LUCK. [New York Magazine]
After more attacks on Palestine, Nobel laureates, artists, and public intellectuals are calling for a military embargo. On the list are names like Alice Walker, Brian Eno, and Ismail Coovadia, the former South African ambassador to Israel. [Algérie Résistance]
The term “Normcore,” which started out as Brad Troemel’s tongue-in-cheek reference to DIS Magazine fodder (office casual, IKEA, Under Armour) now seems to have extended to plastic surgery. The “New New Face” is a surgical tactic to round out and normalize older women’s faces, and naturally, an artist is mining it. Amalia Ulman is getting plastic surgery to grow as close as possible to blandness.
The author voices the same problem I have with the jogging and have had all along with Normcore “détournement”: “I just wonder if capitalism is so inescapable that there is no radical alternative left to us other than performing it?” Again: an artist is chopping up her body, in order to comment on Normcore. [Bullet Magazine]
Reproductive rights advocates are turning to the states to get around the Supreme Court’s decision to allow religious companies like Hobby Lobby to drop birth control from its employees’ health care. [Slate]
Which artists are going to shake President Obama’s hand this year? The National Medal of Arts award nominees are out and the only visual artist on the list is James Turrell. The Brooklyn Academy of Music has also been nominated. The ceremony will happen this coming Monday, July 28. [NEA]
A petition to “Save the Corcoran” has successfully stalled the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s merger. Due to financial problems, the Corcoran Gallery of Art plans to cede control of its collection to the National Gallery and operate the College of Art and Design under George Washington University. [The Art Newspaper]
Baynard Woods, editor for Baltimore’s City Paper tries, however unsuccessfully, to get Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to talk about her views on art. “Of course I like art, I went to goddamn Oberlin,” she told Woods.[City Paper]
Seems like the polls were right. Detroit pensioners vote to back the Grand Bargain, which is a huge step forward in the city’s effort to protect the DIA’s collection. [Detroit Free Press]
Day two in stories about giant amphibious art in China: Yesterday in Guiyang City a giant inflatable duck disappeared. Today, Chinese censors are banning Internet reports about a giant inflatable toad floating in Beijing Park. Why? Because people are comparing it to ex-President Jiang Zemin. [BBC News]
Plans for New York’s as-yet-to-be built Museum of African Art have been shelved for more modest ones. What would have been a $135 million project has now been cut by $40 million. It seems that younger institutions, though they may want to fight for the right to make mega-million-dollar institutions (like Whitney, MoMA, Lincoln Center) just don’t have the backing. [The New York Times]
Not art-related, but terrifying: Newsweek has a cover profile on Vladimir Putin and his life of “an endless procession of gilded rooms.” He does not like or understand the Internet. He’s referred to by his inner circle as the “Tsar.” He loves dogs. He is emotionless. He views ceding power as the greatest criminal act. [Newsweek]

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Thursday Links: The Universe Is a Clown

by Paddy Johnson Henry Kaye Corinna Kirsch on July 17, 2014

“Clown of the Party” from POBA, the internet artist graveyard. (Pete Ham)

“The glittering chains of galaxies are no more substantial, no more reliable guides to physical reality, than greasepaint on the face of a clown.” A New York Times video on dark matter shows the visible universe to be only five percent of the larger universe, which scientists are only now beginning to plot. This invisible universe, which is defined by dark matter, is the scaffolding for the galaxies we see today. [The New York Times]
Art critic Barbara Rose has been buddies with artist Carl Andre since the 1950s; that camaraderie shows through in her Brooklyn Rail review of Andre’s retrospective at DIA. It might go down in history as the most glowing review ever written about the artist. (Of course, no mention of Ana Mendieta.) [The Brooklyn Rail]
Paddy Johnson profiles digital artist Nicolas Sassoon. Sassoon is currently completing an online residency for Opening Times, a non-profit that supports online artists based in London, and has been working on creating browser-sized GIFs. [Artnet]
This might be a scam: a site was launched yesterday that provides, at an annual rate of $49.95, immortality (at least on the Internet). POBA: Where the Arts Live, an online platform that asks grieving families, estate managers, or anybody who owns the rights to any artist’s legacy, to post the work of the deceased artist. It’s meant to be a site of commemoration, but really it just feels like an Internet graveyard. Creepy. [Hyperallergic]
Recommended Tonight: Collector’s Night at the Brooklyn Historical Society. You can see a woman’s collection of cockroach legs left in her apartment by her cat, all the clocks featured in the movie “Back to the Future,” and a stockpile of old bike seats. There will be piles of pins, dipsticks from automobiles, and objects found in cemeteries such as a dead bird, letters that have fallen off tombstones, and feathers. Also, 600 disco shirts, 300 neckties, and 90 pairs of shoes. In short: Go to this. [The New York Times]
The Whitney is putting on an event for teens during the Jeff Koons retrospective. AFC office response: “High school students can deal with cum on the face.” [The Whitney]
A public art space in London called The Wall, is being torn down. Why? Because the Residents Association see the current and inaugural work being shown, Stefan Bruggemann’s Text Pieces, to be an advertisement, not art. The Residents Association even struck an unnecessarily aggressive tone: “we want this amateur daub’s wish fulfilled in that it should be recognised when it is destroyed, as one of the mindless texts suggests.” Sign the petition to keep The Wall alive here. [Frieze Magazine via. Twitter]
Who’s behind the Artist Pension Trust, a royalties-based art sales firm? Moti Shniberg, a tech startup investor responsible for selling facial recognition technology to Facebook, and attempting to trademark the term “Sept. 11, 2001.” The latter, you can imagine, was a failed attempt. [Bloomberg]

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Committing to the Difficult Option: Donors Give $26.8 Million to DIA

by Henry Kaye on July 16, 2014

There’s been talk about two of Detroit’s options to pay off its retiree pensions, one difficult and one ugly.

This Wednesday, in a demonstration that there is still an ample supply of good in the world, donors have shown their commitment to the difficult option instead of resigning to the ugly one.

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