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Vanity Fair

Friday Links: Ballroom Inspired By Derelict Detroit Buildings Coming to Brooklyn

by Michael Anthony Farley on May 12, 2017

LOL. Someone at Vanity Fair, intending to reach John Waters via his mailing address at Atomic Books, addressed an envelope to “Jhon Walters; Antomic Books”. [Facebook]
The last few building booms have contributed some pretty heinous new additions to New York’s cityscape, but this might just be the worse. I’m not sure we can even call this ill-proportioned stack of claustrophobia-inducing hotel rooms clad in signifiers of “Brooklyn-ness” (Brick! Street Art!) and mismatched decor trends architecture. This is straight-up an attraction out of a theme park, which I suppose makes sense considering it’s called “The Williamsburg Hotel”. The most cringe-inducing detail? A grand ballroom designed to “reflect the derelict buildings of Detroit”. [Dezeen]
This is awesome. Baltimore nonprofit art space/residency Creative Alliance is throwing a giant dance party tomorrow in support the city’s status as a “sanctuary city”. Bailar Sin Miedo will feature Mexican food vendors, bachata lessons, and live music. [Creative Alliance]
The Hard Times has now fully replaced The Onion as my newsfeed’s satirical headline supplier of choice: “Moving to Brooklyn Gave Me the Confidence Needed to Finally Start Wearing This Hat”. [The Hard Times]
A giant Jeff Koons inflatable sculpture of a ballerina is coming soon to Rockefeller Center. [artnet News]
Here’s a sneak peak at the new Marciano Museum opening in LA later this month. The inaugural exhibition is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library.” From the few images here, though, it doesn’t really seem like the Marciano Collection is particularly good? [Los Angeles Times]
Rioters in Portland smashed the windows of Michael Parsons Gallery, which unbeknownst to them, ironically, was showing paintings of last year’s riots by Alex Lilly. Is this a Portlandia sketch for the Trump era? [Oregon Live]

An Artist’s Guide to the Democratic Primaries

by Michael Anthony Farley on April 8, 2016

In this increasingly heated primary contest, two of the issues that impact our readers most haven’t exactly been hot-button topics. Candidates rarely discuss funding for the arts or affordable housing in the nation’s rapidly-gentrifying cities.

New Yorkers head to the polls Tuesday, April 19th, and the art school meccas of Providence, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New Haven will be casting their ballots one week later, on April 27th. The Democratic race for New York has been especially tense, with the April 14th debate at Brooklyn Navy Yard looming on the horizon. How in touch are the candidates with issues pertinent to our readers? For starters, neither one knows how to ride the subway. But both have been staunch advocates for the arts and make claims that they’ll tackle the nation’s affordable housing crisis. I’ve done some digging on how their records on those issues stack up.

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Monday Links: How to Stay Out of Jail

by Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball on December 8, 2014

Our calendar launch and signing party takes place tomorrow night at Sargent’s Daughters, 6-8 pm. Join us! [Art F City]
All satire was lost on the titler of Ben Davis’s Art Basel report. “Art Basel in Miami Beach 2014 is a Rip-Roaring Success” is a tongue-in-cheek Hunter S. Thompson-like view of the fair and its inanities. Referring to the fair as “the Maze,” Davis asks, “Who are these people? They wander in a distracted state, and appear happily lost in the space. Though the Maze experience seems to be the main draw, there is also a huge and growing market for Maze memorabilia, as these people buy up the puzzles from the Maze, to recreate part of the experience in their own homes for friends or mates.” This whole fair is a cultural vacuum, and nobody should be expected to come up with things to say about it. [Artnet News]
Punching a hole through an £8 million Monet will get you jailed. Don’t do it! [Metro]
Galapagos Art Space is moving to Detroit. “A white-hot real estate market is burning through the affordable cultural habitat,” said Robert Elmes, the space’s executive director. “And it’s no longer a crisis, it’s a conclusion.” [New York Times]
Jerry Saltz is the Jonathan Swift of social media? Puh-leeze. That was a week long spoiled middle school rant. [Wall Street Journal]
Chlorine Gas Leak in Chicago Disrupts “Furries” Convention. [NPR]
An actual headline from Vanity Fair: Everything You Need to Know to Prepare for Kate Middleton and Prince William’s New York City Trip. [No link]
“It’s a problem that I work in a profession that capitalizes on how cool it is to be black until it’s not cool to be black. If Kehinde Wiley decided to make black men killed by #damngoodcops the subject of his next portrait series, the art world would care.Wiley’s dealers would rightfully sell his works as the important documents of our time — and they’d make a pretty penny. Curators and critics would praise the series as an important reflection of this turbulent moment in American history. My colleagues would tell the media that an exhibition of his work is the most important statement about racism today. Unfortunately, racism doesn’t only exist when white people want to acknowledge and benefit from it.” [Hyperallergic]

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Monday Links: So Many Opening Ceremonies

by Anthony Hicks Paddy Johnson Corinna Kirsch on February 10, 2014

Palestinian fisherman finds a long-lost Greek statue of Apollo, Hamas police officials confiscate it once they notice it’s up for sale on eBay. [The Guardian]
Artist Chuck Close who suffers from face blindness (that is to say, prosopagnosia), was hired by Vanity Fair to take photos of celebs without makeup because, you know, he is the ultimate least judge-y person in the world and does not care that ScarJo has an oily face. We assume it’s up to Vanity Fair readers to decide who’s hot or not, without gobs of eyeliner. [Dlisted]
Artist Tony Matelli responds to criticism that his “Sleepwalker” sculpture should be removed from the Wellesley College campus. It sounds like he doesn’t care too much about the removal: “I don’t think they’ll make that decision, but if they make that decision, that’s fine with me.” [CBS News]
The opening of “Dumb Starbucks” is an art project. We’ll see how long fair-use law will let this parody business last—especially since they’re not even serving their own pastries. Ruh roh! [LAist]
“San Franciscans Wait Two Hours in the Rain for Day-Old New York Bagels.” [Uptown Almanac]
In case you missed the Olympics opening ceremony, the Cirque du Soleil-inspired performance pays tribute to Russian artists like Kazimir Malevich. [The Washington Post]
Plus-size dog clothing is on the rise. [Reuters]
The Broad Museum of Art will not open until 2015. [The New York Times]
The theatrics that seem to accompany the release of a new Lars Von Trier film are in full swing: Shia LaBeouf wore a bag on his head and Von Trier was ostentatiously silent at the Nymphomaniac opening in Berlin. [The Guardian]

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Thursday Links: Auction Horror Think Piece

by Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball on November 14, 2013

"Study for the Nurse from the Battleship Potemkin", Francis Bacon, 1957

WSJ’s comparing buying a Bacon painting to buying the services of a sports player (“The Art of Fielding”). William Powhida points out that unlike art, a player isn’t “private property that we may or may not see again.” [Wall Street Journal]
AFC’s twitter feed is filled with tweets expressing horror over last night’s record breaking auction results at Sotheby’s. (This sales video for Warhol’s Car Crash prompted ArtInfo’s Tyler Green to ask how the Sotheby’s people live with themselves). What people buy isn’t the problem here. It’s the income inequality driving the success of these auctions that deserves outrage and action. [Twitter]
The term “hedge fund activist” has been coined. Apparently this term describes shareholders who exert pressure on the companies they’ve invested in, to change in directions they see fit. Daniel S. Loeb, for example, thinks Sotheby’s needs a makeover. [Dealbook]
Lily Allen takes issue with sexism in the music industry. Cue the think pieces. [The Guardian]
Selina Gomez is in the sentimental art film “Searching” by Victoria Mahoney. She’s wearing lingerie, so I guess that’s reason to talk about it? [The Superficial]
Jerry Saltz on Reddit AMA. Regular Saltz readers will be familiar with most of his answers, but he did remind us (AFC’s Paddy Johnson) that we like Francis Bacon a whole lot more than Saltz. His 2009 show at the Met was fantastic. [Vulture, summary]
An activist artist in Switzerland is gathering signatures for a minimum federal income distributed to all people. The New York Times’ Annie Lowry doesn’t think it’s that crazy, arguing that here and abroad it would only be a better use of money locked up in welfare. [New York Times]

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MATTE: Elisabeth Biondi, “The Pictures Have to Be Strong”

by Matthew Leifheit on October 7, 2013

Even those unfamiliar with Elisabeth Biondi’s name have probably seen her work. Until she left The New Yorker in 2011, she had been their photo editor for fifteen years. Prior to that, she was the photo editor for Vanity Fair. And before that, she was the photo editor for Geo, a German magazine with a focus on geography, history, and world culture that went out of business in the 80’s. For this interview, I talked to Biondi about what it was like to work with photographers like Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton, what life at The New Yorker is like and how photography has changed since she got in the game. The short answer to that last question: video is going to have a much bigger presence in the future.

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Monday Links: Colossal Reads

by Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball on May 6, 2013

Jeff Koons stands in front of his masterpiece, the BMW.

New York Mag has a colossal profile on Jeff Koons, his fame, and his lack of respect. [NY Mag]
The Parsons Festival of talks, workshops, and openings is in full swing. We’re most likely to see the MFA Design and Technology Exhibition, which opens Wednesday night. [Parsons]
William Gibson was interviewed at New York Public Library (NYPL) by Paul Holdengraber. About half of artforum’s write up is dedicated to discussing Neuromancer. My favorite part of the interview though, comes at the end, when Gibson notes that the main brach’s basement looks like a “Difference Engine”. In a different time in my life I worked in the Exhibitions Department at the NYPL, which was located in said basement. We used to call it, “The Indiana Jones Wing” of the library, as you always had the feeling a giant ball of stone was about to chase you down the corridors. – PJ [ArtForum]
Vanity Fair has a colossal piece on the details of Facebook’s purchase of Instagram, which is so long that we’re reserving for next weekend. [Vanity Fair]
An infographic of common names in Great Britain. [Uncertainty of Identity]
We’reAboutToGetSwarmedWithAGiantHordeofCicadas aieee! [Gothamist]
Chicago Magazine has produced a version of Art F City’s STUFF for Contemporary Art Daily’s Forrest Nash. [Chicago Magazine]

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Vanity Fair

MATTE: Elisabeth Biondi, “The Pictures Have to Be Strong”

Monday Links: Colossal Reads

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