Massive Links! The DIY And Then Some Edition!

by Liza Eliano on July 12, 2010 Massive Links

AFC Screen Grab, via buybootypop.com

Brace yourself. This edition of Massive Links! wants your insight as artist, art-goer, and cocktail maker.

First off, apexart is holding a “Commercial” Art Video Call, inviting everyone and their mom, including those “non-art people,” to “take any broadcast commercial, cut it, dub it, repeat it, or flip it, and make it art.” Pretty much anything goes as long as the video is up to 60 seconds and uses a broadcast commercial as the raw footage. We can only imagine the number of manipulated car commercials that will be submitted, but AFC suggests going the infomercial route. This ad for Booty Pop, the padded bra for your ass, might be the perfect place to start. Videos are now being accepted online until October 31st.

A picture of a visitor taking a picture of a visitor by a visitor, via The Whitney Museum flickr page

Speaking of this “everyone can be an artist” fad, the Whitney is taking a bite out of the flickr craze and asking visitors to submit their photos of the Christian Marclay: Festival exhibit on view till September 26th. The project is evidently in its beginning stages, the new flickr group including photos of visitors scribbling on a wall-sized chalk board with musical staff lines, and composing a score that will be performed throughout the show. Constantly evolving, the page not only allows the public to create and document their work but provides them with a chance to be featured on the site’s landing page. Projects like these have been popular in the past, especially the Brooklyn Museum’s Wikipedia Loves Art from 2009  that spiced things up with a scavenger hunt of objects to be photographed. The Whitney only started to promote the flickr page through Twitter Friday so it remains to be seen how far it will go. Roberta Smith makes the exhibition sound worth seeing though, so hopefully the project will pull more people into the show.  From the review:

The show is an ode to joy: the joy of music and art, and above all the joy of their emergence from everyday life at its most humble and ordinary. Without re-establishing the traditional gap between art and life, or artwork and audiences, it does what art does best: it opens us up to the power of the creative imagination in action.

Cinema 16, via The Los Angeles Times

Cinema 16, the New York based screening series curated by Molly Surno that pairs silent films with contemporary musicians, makes its west coast debut on July 22nd.  Five experimental shorts with original live scores by the music collective Lucky Dragons will run at the Royal/T in L.A. We can’t make it to this one, so Los Angelise go and report back!

Harvey Pekar, via Lonnie Timmons III for The Plain Dealer

We’re sad to report the death of comic-book legend Harvey Pekar, who passed away today at his home in Cleveland Heights after a year long battle with lymphoma. Pekar was best known for his autobiographical series “American Splendor” that became a movie and was also featured in the documentary Comic Book Confidential, which Paddy reviewed for The Reeler back in 2006.  The Plain Dealer notes that Pekar’s work dealt less with superheroes and more with “a different sort of heroism: The working-class, everyman heroics of simply making it through another day, with soul — if not dignity — intact.” But he wasn’t afraid to stand up to the man—that man being David Letterman as seen in this clip from his controversial appearance on the show.

In lighter news, AFC is in need of an office makeover and this might be just the thing to spruce it up.  Absolut Vodka has created four limited edition drink pitchers with custom-designed work by urban artists Stephen Powers and Chiho Aoshima. This comes in a long line of creative collaborations for Absolut, that include projects with Andy Warhol, Keith Harring, and most recently Spike Lee, whose bottle design for Absolut Brooklyn has been all over subway ads. We’ll take some mixed drink suggestions while we wait for our sample pitcher to arrive!

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