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NYPD

How Much is Culture Worth Compared to Melania Trump?

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on March 24, 2017

New York’s arts organizations stand to lose big time under Trump’s NEA-gutting budget. New York taxpayers are already losing big time while footing the bill for the Trump family’s security owing to the First Lady’s decision to remain in her Manhattan penthouse.

We wondered: just how much art could you fund with a few hours of Melania’s security detail?

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Wednesday Links: But Some People Do Care

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on May 18, 2016

Some view Peregrine Honig’s restroom signs as insensitive.

Former Work of Art contestant Peregrine Honig’s “We Don’t Care” restroom signs—created in response to North Carolina’s discriminatory transgender bathroom laws—are sparking some heated social media debate that for once doesn’t involve the right wing. Some view the $150 signs as exploitative and dismissive, while others (mostly cisgendered people) support the artist. It’s spread to multiple threads, but in this one we get to watch AFC friend Molly Rhinestones and Jerry Saltz on opposite sides of the debate. [Facebook]

As the cost of riding the MTA continues to rise, fare evasion on the subway is now the number one cause for arrests in NYC, disproportionately affecting low income people of color. All those arrests cost the city $51 million annually. But it would only cost the city $40.5 million to offer those same 29,000 riders free metrocards instead of arrest records and a night in jail. Activists are trying to call attention to this absurd policy by giving out free metrocard swipes in low-income neighborhoods. [Elite Daily]

Hate read: this piece equates the late Tony Goldman’s art-branded gentrifications schemes with social practice and community arts. Like, not as a criticism of community arts’ vaguely colonial undertones, but as an endorsement of art as a tool for developers. Seriously? [The Huffington Post]

Related: a household now needs to earn $158,000 annually to rent a two-bedroom in New York City, according to HUD metrics. This is so unacceptable. [Curbed]

Who is Yusaku Maezawa, the handsome billionaire from Chiba who pretty much single-handedly rescued the market with almost $100 million in contemporary art purchases last week? He’s a fashion mogul, former musician, and philanthropist with a foundation in Tokyo and a guest house for artists in London. Dear Mr. Maezawa, please bring us to Japan to see your collection, love AFC. [Observer]

This is adorable. Virginia Beach Arts and Humanities Commissioner Ben Loyola is offended by the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art showing Mark Ryden, who uses Catholic imagery in subversive-cheesy ways, and “paintings of nude portraits in all positions.” He’s upset taxpayer money is funding this. Ben, if you need a theme for a party to raise awareness about your concerns, I suggest the 1980s. [WAVY]

Unsurprisingly, more powerful figures from the art world have been named in the Panama Papers. The latest are gallerist Dominique Lévy and Miami mega-collector Ella Fontanals-Cisneros. If you really need to stash assets in a non-taxable form, can’t you just buy more art for your personal museum? [artnet News]

Your animal video of the day: Panda & basket. Cleaning up leaves is a much harder job than it looks when there is a panda involved. [YouTube]

Hip-hop artist The Game commissioned a $65,000 portrait of Prince from street artist Madsteez. I want to see this on the hood of a car. [Complex]

Ben Davis thoughtfully reflects on Jordan Wolfson’s installation at David Zwirner, which focuses a human-like robot being tortured. Davis concludes that Wolfson has a violent need to command the attention of the viewer. [artnet News]

The Handicraft Building in Minneapolis, which was erected in 1907 to house women artists and craftspeople, is being partially demolished and renovated into luxury apartments. This is terrible. Dozens of artists will be displaced, in addition to artist-run galleries. This follows a pattern in downtown Minneapolis, in which small-scaled historic structures are being demolished to make way for larger developments. [City Pages]

In other real estate news, artist-run space Essex Flowers is relocating to Chinatown, where they’ll have a bigger space. [ARTnews]

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Tuesday Links: Lust for Life Model

by Paddy Johnson Michael Anthony Farley Rea McNamara on March 1, 2016

Today’s the press preview for the Met Breuer, but don’t worry about missing out — the Met’s tweeting from the preview. [Twitter]
OK, why didn’t we get the invite to Jeremy Deller’s life drawing class at the New York Academy of Arts last week? Iggy Pop was the model. Anyways, it’s for Deller’s upcoming show at the Brooklyn Museum, and it was invite-only. [The Guardian]
Gabrielle Moser weighs in on the “Showroom” group show at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, and what it gets wrong about the Toronto arts scene: “there are condo ads on the subway that demonstrate greater diversity than this exhibition.” Of the 48 artists in this institutional survey, seven are POC artists. I would add that the curatorial focus was flimsy — how could it not be with so many artists? — and almost conflates the institution’s recent merging of its two galleries as one institution with the city’s recent urban “revitalization” history. Like Moser said, the show’s title could have been “Toronto Artists Want Things to Look Nice.” [Canadian Art]
How can digital art improve the IRL? Rianna Jade Parker asks five producers in the realm — including artist Tabita Rezaire and POWRPLNT founder Angelina Dreem — to weigh in. [FADER]
300 pounds of marijuana, worth one million, was discovered by NYPD in a crate labelled “art”. [artnet News]
Garry Neill Kennedy reflects on his time as president of the Nova Scotia College of and Design — subject of a recent major survey at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia — and the role NSCAD play in the rise of Conceptual Art. [Artforum]
“[I realized] I can’t tell your story, I can only tell mine. I can’t be you, I can only be me.” Insightful interview with painter Faith Ringgold, and her 70-year career in art and activism. It’s a shame her quilts haven’t been taken seriously by institutions though — despite owning her masterpiece, Tar Beach, since it was made in 1988, the Guggenheim has never shown the work in New York. [ARTnews]
HG Masters remembers Kikuo Saito, the Japanese artist known for his abstract color field paintings and wordless plays. He was a former assistant of Noland and Frankenthaler, worked with Jerome Robbins and Robert Wilson — who offers a tributary poem in the obituary — and taught at the Art League up until his death. [ArtAsiaPacific]
John Hofsess, director of the trippy late-’60s Canadian underground classic Palace of Pleasure, has died. Hofsess, however, eventually became a Right to Die advocate, and posthumously revealed the secret assisted suicide service he offered to eight Canadians, including poet Al Purdy. [Toronto Life]
Jan Vermeer’s paintings are now available for high res download. [Open Culture]
Crowdfunding Art Project of the Day: The Queer Japan Project, a documentary about the country’s LGBTQ2S artists and activists. [Kickstarter]

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Tuesday Links: George Zimmerman Continues to Troll Us

by Paddy Johnson Michael Anthony Farley Rea McNamara on August 18, 2015

Image credit: New York Daily News

George Zimmerman is a painter, apparently. His latest works? Paintings of Confederate flags that you can buy prints of from a gun dealer’s website. There’s also a contest involved. [TMZ]
The NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association somehow manages to be even more Orwellian than its name. The group has been encouraging off-duty police officers to photograph the city’s booming homeless population. Those images have been posted to the Association’s social media accounts in some sort of attempt to …shame people into not being homeless? [Hyperallergic]
Dragan Espenschied weighs in on Blingee’s imminent “sunsetting”, and what made it so attractive to artists with an internet-based practice: it was a web 2.0 “stupid” image-making tool with a distinct aesthetic (glitter!) operating within a web 1.0 community model. “Looking at a blingee in blingee display mode is like going through a 1990’s free graphics collection that amateurs used to exchange elements for their homepages.” Also: apparently Blingee’s super-users were Russian grandmothers. Who knew? [One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age]
The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation has just announced that it will offer funding to select New York Organizations in the following sectors: arts education, public art, art in community and service centers, artistic activism, community-based museums, expanded access to art, art in the service of social justice or change and the promotion of under-recognized artistic practice. [The Observer]
Gilbert Vicario has been hired by the Phoenix Art Museum as the new curator of contemporary art, a position the museum hasn’t seen filled in over a decade. This comes in the midst of a major personnel exodus and re-shuffle under the new museum directorship of Amada Cruz. [Artforum]
Charlotte, North Carolina now has the rarefied status right of having an all-Drake radio station on their FM dial. Jealous! [CBC]
“If a company like Samsung with sufficiently deep pockets can keep battling until [the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office] eventually decides that maybe its patents should never have been awarded in the first place, what’s the point?” Apple loses one of its design patents, and its lawsuit with Samsung continues. Eye roll. [Cult of Mac]
Check out this slideshow archive of photographs, news clippings, and posters from Baltimore’s defunct Proposal Gallery. The artist-run space rented a storefront for $1 a year in the late 70s/early 80s. You know, back when you could buy a house for a dollar. This is why my generation is so bitter. [City Paper]
That time period is the subject of a new exhibition at Frankfurt’s Städel Museum. Figurative—and in particular, “bad”—painting made a comeback in West Germany as a reaction to minimalism. Bonus: I learned a new German word, one of those impossibly long, oddly specific words for an abstraction that German does so well that we have no equivalent for. “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” is to come to terms with the past and dark history of one’s culture. [The Economist]
It’s mid-August, so you know what that means: announcements from the Toronto International Film Festival regardings its early-September slate of gala premieres and red carpet photo calls. While many focus on its significance in Hollywood — it’s People’s Choice Award is considered a precursor for Oscar glory — it’s also important for its programming of experimental and video art. So, that being said, we’re looking forward to its Wavelengths programme, and world premieres by Mark Lewis (he represented Canada at the 2009 Venice Biennale) and Mexican auteur Nicolàs Pereda. [Toronto International Film Festival]
Cy Gavin, who is presently showing at Sargent’s Daughters, incorporates materials such as his father’s cremated remains into his paintings. [The New York Times]
The six most popular art exhibitions, according to the Instagram hive-mind. [artnet News]
Internet shame army, London, Ontario police need your help: a woman has been filmed stealing flowers from a gravesite, and they are trying to identify her. [BuzzFeed]

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Wednesday Links: The Perfect Stocking Stuffer

by Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball on December 31, 2014

Put this in your kids stockings.

It took us all year, but we’ve found the best link of 2014. Here’s a Play-Doh toy that looks just like a penis. Is Play-Doh play a thing now? [E!]
A shitty year, in words: the trending searchwords of 2014, from Dictionary.com, include asphyxiation, misogynistic, and sociopath. [Dictionary.com]
On the upside, according to the Global Language Monitor, the heart emoji is the most popular word of all. [the Language Monitor, via the Verge]
The story of 11-year-old Sally Horner’s abduction changed the course of 20th-century literature. Fascinating read by Sarah Weinberg on the real Lolita. [Hazzlit]
On nerd entitlement. Laurie Penny nails it. [New Statesman]
Thanks to Ben Davis for a really nice shoutout on artnet News! He listed our follow-up piece on the Gramsci Monument as one of the most important art essays of the year, along with Molly Crabapple’s Saadiyat Island reporting and Trevor Paglen’s Creative Time report. Needless to say, it’s a huge honor. [artnet News]
The MTA is finally getting rid of the subway alarms on the emergency exits, a Bloomberg era invention “to curb fare evasion”. In practice, they annoyed us all on a daily basis. [WNYC via Animal New York]
Something about this Stefan Simchowitz article reminds me of Ariel Levy’s 2007 New York Magazine article on Dash Snow. The contentiousness of its subject becomes a mythologizing force. A good read. [The New York Times Magazine]
Another government delivers an extremely harsh punishment to a fairly benign feminist artwork. Megumi Igarashi, the artist behind the vagina kayak, has been indicted with a potential two-year jail sentence for distributing “obscene” material by distributing the data which allows others to 3D print vagina kayaks. As a testament to the project’s prominence, it comes up first when you google “vagina”. [NPR, via artnet News]
One of the best editorials we’ve read from the New York Times Editorial Board ever. The subject: The NYPD. (And for the second day in a row). A good way to close out the year at The Times. [The New York Times]

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Tuesday Links: Spa Castle Tragedy

by Paddy Johnson and Corinna Kirsch on December 30, 2014

An image that doesn't have much to do with the links today.

Be scared.

An 84-year-old man was found dead in the water at Spa Castle in Queens. The body was discovered when a woman felt something at her feet. [NBC]
In January, you’ll be able to bid on items from the New York City Opera in a bankruptcy auction. [Playbill]
Collectors are hungry for Cuban art, it seems. The New York Times predicts a boom in sales in anticipation of open relations between the U.S. and Cuba. Dealer Magnan Metz told the Times he is “now booked through March with Cuba visits.” [New York Times]
Predictions for emoji of 2015 that are better than the shruggie. [Medium]
Proof that you can’t please everyone, Mayor Bill de Blasio was booed at Monday’s NYPD graduation ceremony. [Mic]
And the NYPD continue to soil their reputation. Traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have plummeted by 94 percent following slaying of two police officers. [New York Post]
The New York Times Editorial has had enough of the NYPD’s nonsense and has called them out for “shredding their hard earned respect.” [The New York Times]
Unemployed curators, listen up. Curatorial jobs are growing in New York’s Finger Lakes region. [Democrat & Chronicle]
Be daring, visit Singapore. In 2015, the city-state is letting anyone test out driverless cars inside its borders. [MIT Technology Review]
Scientists have discovered that drunk birds sing like drunks. STOP THE PRESSES. [NPR]

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Tuesday Links: Beauty Is Passing, Dumb Is Forever

by Corinna Kirsch and Whitney Kimball on December 9, 2014

rain

New Yorkers, expect a “typical Nor’easter” over the next two days. You’ll be fine! It’s just rain! [Boston.com]
So come out to our party tonight! [Arthaps]
And the final Miami reports continue to come in! “NADA is like Williamsburg to ABMB’s Manhattan: hip, relaxed and scruffy, and a little too much.” I haven’t seen scruff and relaxed since Portland. [Scene & Herd]
“Who buys all this shit?” and other questions raised by Christian Viveros-Fauné, when considering art fair art. “[B]eauty is passing, dumb is forever.” [artnet News]
Matthew Leifheit looks at people looking up at the Freedom Tower. [VICE]
Ew ew ew ew ew ew: artist makes soy sauce out of human hair. He was making it because he heard a rumor that China already makes it. [Vulture]
Oh, and the NYPD shot and killed someone inside a synagogue after the assailant stabbed a student at prayer early this morning. It’s on video. [NY Daily News]
There was a two-faced cat, and they lived ‘til the age of 15. Rest in peace, Frank and Louie. [io9]
Also in animal miracles, we forgot to link to this swimming owl last week. A must-watch. [Gawker]
So far, Playboy wins the Art Basel slideshows by a mile, a round-up which, unlike what’s been appearing on art publications, at least includes a moment of reflection. “Does anything truly exceptional go on here or is it all hype?” wonders Zak Stone. Hype. [Playboy]
If you live in Philadelphia, Detroit, or St. Paul, you might want to tune in to hear Bad at Sports interview Tatiana Hernandez of the Knight Foundation. She “manages a portfolio of over 350 grantees, totaling nearly $100 million in investments.” Take notes. [Bad at Sports]
The Nielsen Ratings, but for Anime airing in Japan. [Anime News Network]
Gift idea for the rich: A pink-and-yellow smiling-flower pillow from Takashi Murakami. It’s only $400! [Artspace]
Wall Street Journalist critic Joanne Kaufman has been banned from receiving free press passes from some Broadway agencies. Rick Miramontez of press agency O&M wrote a blog post expressing his dismay at Kaufman, who recently penned a column about leaving during intermission. She’s still welcome, Miramontez wrote, “If she deems a show of ours worthy enough for her (fleeting) attention, she is more than welcome to call us to arrange tickets – but she had better have a credit card handy.” [Playbill]
Tweets of Old is posting letters to Santa from the early 1900s. Among other stuff, children asked for bananas, a waste paper basket, and wood. [Tweets of Old]
Seattle police in riot gear have outfitted themselves as Robocops with bike helmets, according to this twitpic. [Twitter]

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Wednesday Links: David Lynch Plates, In; Manic Pixie Dream Girls, Out

by Clara Olshansky and Whitney Kimball on July 31, 2013

Leading up to the release of “The Shining” sequel, the Times has done an exhaustive profile on Stephen King’s family, all of them, prolific writers. [New York Times]
“This “modern global exchange” is what we critics like to call a “restaurant.” That’s New York Times food critic Pete Wells, tearing PRspeak a new asshole. The food at ABC Cocina actually sounds very good. [New York Times]
French porcelain manufacturer Bernardaud issued some awesome special edition dinnerware by big name artists like Jeff Koons and David Lynch, because who doesn’t want to eat off a $380 naked lady? [ARTnews]
Via @adev9, our favorite Forbes title ever: “Underwater Crab Robot Takes First Plunge.” [Forbes]
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is reportedly no more. [New York Magazine]
Who says the aristocracy is dead? Viscount Allendale and his wife visited the National Gallery of Art to see a hundred million dollar painting once owned by his great-great-grandfather, but sold for petty cash. It’s okay, though. They still have a Rembrandt. [Washington Post]
Charles Isherwood was intrigued but exhausted by the bizarre, international smorgasbord of theater offered at the Lincoln Center Festival, which ended last weekend. [New York Times]
A wise choice: Jack Goldstein’s “The Jump” is coming to a Times Square billboard in August. [ARTInfo]
Ben Sutton reports that a sketch artist who drew the Manning case is selling her drawings to help cover Manning’s legal fees. As we found out yesterday, Manning was found not guilty of aiding the enemy, but on several counts of espionage and theft, enough to put him in prison for up to 130 years. [ARTInfo]
Update! On Monday, we brought you Tré Reising, a grad student who’s been making giant sculptures for rappers, which they then put in their videos. As promised, his tribute sculpture to RiFF RaFF made it in the backdrop of this Paper Mag story (second image down). Success. [Paper Mag]

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