- Ted Cruz, the Republican presidential candidate who once said “We need to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts,” has dropped out of the race after losing the Indiana primary. This inspired Samantha Bee to tweet the above in reference to Cruz’s anti-abortion stance. [Twitter]
- The Baltimore Museum of Art has named Christopher Bedford as its new director. Bedford is curating the American pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale and will be leaving his post at Brandeis University’s Rose Museum. [The Baltimore Sun]
- Real estate developer/art collector Aby Rosen has been ordered to pay New York $7 million in back taxes after some shady art dealings. [Forbes]
- Suzy Lake has been awarded the sixth annual Scotiabank Photography Award. The award includes a $50,000 cash prize and a solo show for the Toronto-based artist at the Ryerson Image Center in 2017. [Canadian Art]
- App as conceptual art project: Disk Cactus, an Oakland-based artist duo, have created the iTunes app AI*SCRY. Playing off of AI and “scrying” (a method of crystal ball divination), the app adds words pulled from Microsoft’s COCO image recognition database to whatever images you choose to snap with your smartphone camera. The descriptors of this project — ”childlike”, “playful”, “whimsical” — makes this seem less conceptual art project and more an interactive art prototype that could be sold off to a start-up or adapted for an agency. [Hyperallergic]
- In animal news, wild gorillas have been found to hum happy songs while they eat. Two sound files are embedded in the article. Singing might be an overstatement for what this is—it’s more like a guttural growl. [New Scientist]
- The FBI has searched suspected mobster Robert Gentile’s home for clues related to the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, one of the largest unsolved art thefts ever. [The Boston Globe]
- Iranian artist Atena Farghadani has been freed after spending more than a year in prison. Farghadani was arrested last year and original sentenced 12 years for a satirical cartoon that depicted Iranian government members as monkeys and goats for bills that would restrict access to voluntary sterilization and contraception. [Art Newspaper]
- The Biennale de Montreal announced their preliminary artist list. New works will be commissioned by Moyra Davey and Anne Immhof, and the rest seems to be evenly split between international (Joe Namy, Frances Stark, Nicole Eisenman) and Canadian (Valerie Blass, Luis Jacob, Nadia Belerique). [ARTnews]
- Artist Eric Oglander and writer Gideon Jacobs have a new column “Accidental Internet” in which they recontextualize found imagery that is “beautiful, compelling, or interesting, that was not created with the intention of being beautiful, compelling, or interesting.” [VICE]
- Ilma Gore, the artist who drew Donald Trump with a micropenis, reports that she was assaulted by a Trump supporter near her home in Los Angeles. A man in a black Honda Civic drove up, exited the car, punched her in the face, and shouted “Trump 2016!” [The Huffington Post]
