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Modern Art Notes

Monday Links: Social Media Loses; Wet Dog Wins

by Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball on May 5, 2014

Sophie Gamand, from “Wet Dog” portraits

A “Wet Dog” portrait by Sophie Gamand has won the BBC’s portraiture award. More wet dogs on her site. [Sophie Gamand]
The New Museum has announced that Google Glass will sponsor the 2015 Triennial, and the technology will be used with a custom “visitor engagement” app, which is hooked up to social media. No word yet as to how this might affect the art. [The New Museum]
Modern Art Notes is on hiatus. No big surprise there—BlouinArtInfo has been hemorrhaging writers—but a bummer nonetheless. [Modern Art Notes]
Further proof that the Knoedler scandal was not the work of a single painter, but was a pervasive industry problem. According to the Times, scholars were threatened with lawsuits, others were paid off, and not enough people asked questions. “In an industry whose transactions cry out for verification of both title to and authenticity of subject matter, it is deemed poor practice to probe into either,” wrote New York Supreme Court Judge J. Shorter. [New York Times]
The New York Times uses Jack Flam, the president of the Dedalus Foundation (the foundation for Robert Motherwell’s estate), as their art historian source for the Knoedler story. Flam has been accused by Motherwell’s friend and art historian Dore Ashton of overstepping his executive role to take liberties with the catalogue raisonée, overpaying himself, and ousting the dissenters. [Bloomberg]
One day, a poor engineer named Rob Rhinehart decided he could save money on food by heading to the internet, buying a bunch of amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates, sticking them in a blender, and using that concoction as a replacement for food. He named his magic mix, “Soylent” after the 1973 sci-fi film “Soylent Green” and after a Kickstarter that raised more $100k in two hours, he’s started a company. Is this the end of food? Rhinehart claims he’s never felt better. [The New Yorker]
Lots of talk these days about Twitter’s problems, and they aren’t or are insurmountable. They announced last week that their active users increased by only 5.8 percent from the previous quarter. This particular take sees the bulk of their problems as marketing (and stagnation due to board infighting). [Stratechery]
More evidence of widespread social media fatigue: this video about putting away your phone has gone viral. Since we watched it an hour ago, it’s already accumulated a million more views. [YouTube]
Activist shareholder Daniel Loeb has landed himself a position on Sotheby’s board in a compromise deal. [Art Market Monitor]
Apparently a lot of items going up for auction this week already have bidders. [The New York Times]
Designer Matt Daniels has measured the number of unique words in rappers’ lyrics, and found that Outkast, Blackalicious, Ghostface Killah, and Wu Tang have all beaten Shakespeare in their invention of new words. [Matt Daniels]

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Thursday Links: The Art World Demands Answers

by Whitney Kimball and Hannah Garner on September 19, 2013

G. Wayne Clough, the Smithsonian secretary who censored the 2011 “Hide/Seek” exhibit on queer portraiture, has finally resigned. An independent curator of the exhibit told the Washington Post that Clough’s “tenure represents one of the last links to an older model of the way museums relate to the lesbian and gay queer community.” But, as Tyler Green points out, the Post itself minimizes Clough’s censorship by burying the story and mislabeling “Hide/Seek”‘s many defenders (including MoMA) as simply “gay activists.” [MAN] [The Washington Post]
“The Art world is the new music world,” Swiss Beatz said at a carnavalesque opening for the Galerie Perrotin on Tuesday, when the Parisian gallery (the supposed “French Gagosian”) set up shop on Madison Avenue. The afterparty, held at the Russian Tea Room, was an art-world carnival of Damien Hirst spin-art booths and crane-clawing for Murakami plush toys. “Our collectors are in the center of the art world, and you always have to surprise them,” said Mr. Perrotin…“People need pleasure” [New York Times]
If you missed it over twitter, yesterday was #AskaCurator day, in which twitter took its questions to 622 museums worldwide. Hyperallergic has a list of questions which should have been better addressed, most of them about the museum world’s enduring whiteness. [Hyperallergic]
The same questions have been raised perennially by John Powers, and specifically last week on NPR by Deborah Solomon. “This is an art season that could make you think that the feminist movement never happened,” Solomon noted, in reference to an excess of retrospectives for creepy white males (Burden, Balthus, Magritte). Walter Robinson put the question to facebook and points to John Powers’ 2011 proposal for an art world Title IX program, the 1972 law illegalizing gender discrimination in higher education. He thinks it’s worth a shot, and so do we; more on that to come. [John Powers; Deborah Solomon; Walter Robinson]
The gender situation, at least, looks a little better in Chicago, based on NewcityArt’s Art 50 round-up. In the institutional department, Madeleine Grynsztejn and Michelle Grabner lead the pack. [Newcity]
TONIGHT: Pin-Up and Gayletter host the afterparty for the Art Book Fair preview, near PS1. Expect this to be packed. [Gayletter]

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A Day for Detroit in Review

by Ian Marshall on August 15, 2013

We owe it to Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes for spearheading “A Day for Detroit” and provoking a veritable downpour of tweets and blog posts. Green urged fellow art bloggers to post their favorite works from the Detroit Institute of Arts and tweet with the hashtage #DayDetroit to raise awareness for the museum’s collection. Given the volume of activity, we spent the better part of our day summarizing what happened.

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A Day for Detroit Round Up: Art F City Edition

by The AFC Staff on August 15, 2013

Good God we were busy yesterday. We spent the day posting images from the Detroit Institute of Arts’ collection as part of “A Day for Detroit”, a co-ordinated blog effort designed to raise awareness about what could be lost were the collection to be sold. This effort was spearheaded by Modern Art Notes’ Tyler Green and was done in collaboration with approximately 20 other art blogs, who did the same on their sites, as well as some of Detroit’s professional art community. We asked artists, curators and dealers who either once lived in Detroit or live there now to name their favorite works from the DIA and to share their stories.

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Morning Links: Resource Edition

by Paddy Johnson and Corinna Kirsch on March 13, 2013

A blog and potential resource for President and canine painter George Bush. [Dog Art Today]
Hilarious! The L.A. MOCA drama told in GIFs. [C-Monstah]
A new art(ish) blog based in Copenhagen launches with reviews of international shows and the odd interview and news item. Not a lot of critical perspective here, but a reasonable start. [Recent Future Archive]
MOCA is close to working out a five-year agreement with The National Gallery in DC, which will include collaborating on programming and research and exhibitions. This might help ward off the LACMA merger. [NYTimes]
Vine hack. Now you can make 20 second videos if you want to. [AnimalNY] Thank-you Jordan Smilovic [Brooklyn Web Developers]
If you’re in Europe, nobody’s going to stop you from watching porn on your computer. It’s porn IRL that’ll get you in trouble. [Mashable]
Guggenheim Museum Director Richard Armstrong writes a letter to Hyperallergic’s Senior Editors Kyle Chayka and Jillian Steinhauer in response to “When Artspeak Means Oppression” penned last week by contributor Mostafa Heddaya. In that piece, Heddaya calls out the Guggenheim for not paying much attention to human rights abuses in the United Arab Emirates where they’re currently building Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. [Hyperallergic]
The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) announced last week that the museum will be laying off 21 people (11 percent of its staff). Why are they doing this? Tyler Green takes a look at their rationale and finds it inconsistent with museum management practices. Consider this your must-read article for the day. [Modern Art Notes]

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This Week in Art Podcasts

by Whitney Kimball on June 27, 2012

What do people talk about when they’re not typing? What does Tyler Green’s voice sound like? This week, I listened to a handful of podcasts to find out.

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AFC’s Halloween Headline Wishlist

by Paddy Johnson on October 31, 2011

The day’s only half way through, which means the AFC office has taken to placing bets on what the rest of today’s Halloween content will look like on the art interwebs. Some headlines we consider likely from our favorite art publishers.

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Modern Art Notes

A Day for Detroit in Review

A Day for Detroit Round Up: Art F City Edition

Morning Links: Resource Edition

AFC’s Halloween Headline Wishlist

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