“The contemporary art market is far ahead of the stock market at least in terms of its frothiness, but, I’m starting to see music sheets on how cheap equities remain based on a traditional, but academic yardstick like the risk premium,” writes Martin Sosnoff. So much of this sentence doesn’t make sense—what is frothiness? There are two more pages where that comes from. [Forbes]
In the latest issue of e-flux, Martha Rosler takes on Artspeak. This “gobbledygook”, like Triple Canopy’s popular International Art English spoof from 2012, is a joke, but, for Rosler, that’s not a reason to give it the brush off: “jokes are often a cover for hostility, and the more elaborate the joke, the more powerful the hostility may be”. Also to look forward to, plenty of of piquant, Rosler-esque anecdotes ranging from restaurant menus to Gullivers’ travels, all in order to get to the sham of our current word salad. [e-flux]
The Indianapolis Museum of Art wins a major award from the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works and with it, a rebuke. Tyler Green has a great report on how the AIC’s award is meant to pressure IMA President Charles Venable into re-evaluating the targets of his cuts. [Modern Art Notes]
The Hirshhorn’s Director Richard Koshalek resigns amidst allegations that the board was not wholly supportive of his vision. That vision spans the range of museum expansion, from “bubble” architecture by the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, to large-scale projects, like a new education center and Richard Serra installation. According to City Paper’s Kriston Capps, the museum board will determine the bubble’s fate later this month while Koshalek will serve out his term through the end of the year. (Personally, we’d like to see a naming contest of the bubble before the project gets scrapped.) [City Paper]
The Creative Time Summit has announced Lucy Lippard as their keynote. As we mentioned on the blog last year, she’s no longer a practicing curator and is a poor speaker. High-profile participants include Vito Acconci, who’s also no longer a practicing artist, and Jimmy McMillan, who, well, okay. He’s a mayoral candidate and founder of “Rent is Too Damn High“. Awesome. [In the Air]
World domination alert! This week marks the launch of the first Art Basel-owned edition of the Hong Kong art fair. Now collectors get Christmas three times a year. (Everybody else still has to share just the one.) [Art in America, The New York Times]
“Attention is what creates value. Artworks are made as well by how people interact with them.” Brian Eno on the future of art making. [Brainpickings]
“Shit-on-the-ground.” “Eye-sores.” Those are the words used to describe Mark di Suvero’s red i-beam creature, which was installed this month on the green surrounding the Golden Gate Bridge. Haters want it removed, but duh, the sculpture is big. [Curbed]
So, congratulations to Mark di Suvero for winning the American Academy of Arts and Letters gold medal for outstanding artistic achievement! [The New York Times]
12th grader Sabrina Brady takes home the Doodle 4 Google prize. The prize includes $30,000 college scholarship, a Chromebook, and a $50,000 technology grant for her school. Her image is on the front page of Google today. [Google Blog]
That topless Bea Arthur painting goes up to auction today. More than two decades after John Currin’s sexy homage to maturity, we still expect a few giggles will be heard across the auction room floor. [Gawker]
Pardon us, but this week, all art news is auction news. We promise to round out the Warhol fluff with more interesting stuff, like say, the fact that, for the first time ever, a Canadian auction house will put video art up on the auction block. [The Star]
Elizabeth Peyton joins a new club, the tiny club for female artists whose work has sold for a million or more at auction. It’s not an actual club, but if it were, she would be in it. [Twitter, via Christie’s]
Unrelated to anything to do with art at all, a massacre in Syria has resulted in the most depraved actions yet by the Assad government. Even reading this report requires a stomach of steel. [NYTimes]
Are Cooper Union’s Finances Fixable? Felix Salmon suggests that perhaps Cooper’s “Chrysler Building land — with its PILOTs intact — could get sold to Trinity Church, or one of New York’s big non-profit hospitals, or even possibly the Bloomberg Foundation.” It’s a fantastic piece and a must-read for anyone who’s been following this story. [Felix Salmon, Reuters]
Now you can sleep easy at night; Paul McCarthy’s massive red balloon dog at Frieze has been sold. [ArtInfo]
Google Street View gets turned into a highly addictive game. [Geoguessr]
NYU Art History professor gets caught taking upskirt photos of girls in fitting rooms. Now he’s a former Art History professor charged with unlawful surveillance. [NY Post]
The Met held its punk-themed gala last night. For those unimportant enough to attend, and for those who don’t really care about Miley Cyrus, there was Twitter. [#metgala, photo courtesy of Kotaku]
Thanks, Tom McCormack for writing a history of ASCII art. Not so thankful for beginning that history with Apollinaire and introducing some dubious terms about the “connoisseur’s medium” (ha) and “the high period of ASCII art”. [Rhizome]
In case you missed it, here’s the ultimate compendium of cats Photoshopped into sushi. [Laughing Squid]
“I am an artist…I designed and built a cat.” [The New Yorker, paywall]
Shit show over at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: They’ve fired or laid off at least eight staff members. At least one of these firings appears to be related to the perception of union sympathizing. The story just gets worse. [Hyperallergic]
MOCA’s “A New Sculpturalism” is facing cancellation, but no one knows precisely why. Pavilion architects for this show are nervous. They’ve invested a lot of time and money to make this show happen. [Architect Magazine]
The Princess Diana Museum will be closing. Her family opened the museum in Althorp soon after her passing. [The Los Angeles Times]
It’s nearly impossible to operate a food truck in NYC without breaking the law thanks to numerous and sometimes conflicting regulations. [NYTimes]
When is it appropriate to drink at an art fair, according to dealers, artists, and reporters? One strange observation, by an anonymous dealer: “The first time I question whether a woman visiting our booth is a collector or a prostitute.” I guess this happens from time to time? [Artspace]
Due to the sequestration, many of Washington, DC’s museums are facing immediate budget shortfalls. For the Smithsonian, this means that several galleries will be closed entirely through September 30th. [Modern Art Notes]
Collector claims Sotheby’s sold him art that was actually Nazi loot. Oops. [The Art Newspaper]
The Art Dealers Association of America is now tweeting. So far, they’ve issued three tweets. [ADAA] [via: Elena Soboleva]
1 billion in art heading to auction next week. [WSJ, paywall]
Supreme, The company behind all those Damien Hirst and George Condo skateboards is suing Leah McSweeney for using the words “Supreme Bitch”. Both McSweeney and Supreme lift their aesthetic from conceptual artist Barbara Kruger, who, yesterday, called them “fools.” before adding, “I’m waiting for all of them to sue me for copyright infringement.” [Complex]
How do you build a large contemporary art collection? Here’s one successful method: send letters to well-known artists and swap “totally insane looking” drawings from your autistic son for their work. That ploy got the attention of This American Life; this week, the radio program aired an episode on this sketchy dude. At ARTINFO, Rosalia Jovanovic picks up where the TAL story leaves off, and speaks to Fredericks & Freiser artist Baker Overstreet about his involvement with the London [This American Life, ARTINFO]
Frieze is on Craigslist. We found an ad scouting out talented magicians, bartenders, and actors for artist Liz Glynn’s performance at the fair. [Craigslist]
Chicago has its first 3D printing facility. Available printers include the personal-use UP Mini and MakerBot, as well as the professional-grade EOS Formiga P110. The Duchamp toilets pictured in this article were made with the home printers. [New City]
The Barnes Foundation is raising ticket prices from 18 to 22 dollars. This isn’t shocking news, but their rationale is bizarre: to prevent visitors from touching the art. [Hyperallergic]
President Obama’s budget proposal for this coming year would boost arts funding by 10%. [Los Angeles Times]
The Met is putting on an exhibition about unicorns to coincide with the 75th anniversary of owning the Unicorn Tapestries. [The Met]
Monkey Farter: A veriositic use of art speak in service of satire. “Here, center stage, the viewer is first confronted with an image that he or she assumes is the monkey farter itself. It is however the first clue to the deceptive and perhaps dangerous game that Will has invited us to play. On closer inspection the object does not so readily give over to the expectations of “monkey” or “monkeyness”….” [Hyperallergic]
Google Glass have begun arriving in the mailboxes of a few hundred “explorers” who pre-ordered the Internet glasses. So far, explorers have begun posting photos documenting the glasses’ meticulous packaging. [The Atlantic Wire]
Andrew Goldstein talks to BOMB Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief Betsy Sussler. “I thought of BOMB as a one-act play, with a catharsis and denouement that would be tied around revelation.” Sussler tells Goldstein in one of seemingly countless quotable moments from the interview. [Artspace]
Calvin Tomkins profiles Jasper Johns, not as an artist but as the executive of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA). In the early 1960s, Johns founded the organization so that his friends could put on performances, and to this day, the foundation continues with a similar model: grants should come from the donation and sale of artworks. Note: Paywall. [The New Yorker]
Disappointingly, Hennessy Youngman’s CVS bangers don’t include K.D. Lang’s “Constant Craving”. Just how thorough is this research!?! That said, we do like that he included “Lady in Red” by Chris de Burgh. [In the Air]
Dealer Daniel Reich passed away at an early age. Gallerist NY’s Michael Miller wrote a rousing commemoration of him last week, and now The New York Times’ Randy Kennedy has done just the same. [Gallerist NY, The New York Times]
For those of you jetsetting to Art Basel this year, we suggest keeping an eye out for for Martin Creed’s moving installation; he’s hired runners to sprint throughout the exhibition hall, and we imagine they’ll knock into more than a few idle bystanders. [Art Basel]
A great read for digital arts people and beyond. Caitlin Jones looks at conceptual art and how conceptual art hinders our understanding of what it produces. [Mousse]
Art critic Tyler Green has criticized the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for charging admission after yesterday’s bombing. We agree. The museum should be free for the rest of the week, as the city recovers. [Tyler Green, Twitter]
Mark your calendars: Hunter MFA open studios run April 26th and 27th! [Facebook]
The Santa Barbara police chief wants to remove a public sculpture on the grounds “it’s become a popular spot for younger, more aggressive street people to congregate.” [Santa Barbara Independent via @shaneferro]
A profile on the Indianapolis Museum of Art Director Charles Venable, who recently cut the museum’s staff by 11%, gets called out by Indianapolis’ NUVO as “cagey and opaque”. Yikes. This follows Tyler Green’s damning article on the director’s decision to make cuts in March. [NUVO]
The Brooklyn Museum is planning an exhibition of cat gods, “Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt.” It won’t be cute, and we fully expect cat mummies like this one to inspire some nightmares. [In The Air]
With Anthony Wiener’s mayoral run, we’re covering our ears just thinking of how many bad puns we’ll be hearing. Prime examples of the worst puns ever, found here. [Politicker]
Hoping that smaller is better, Microsoft is coming out with a 7-inch tablet. They already have plenty of competition in the tiny screen market. [The Daily Beast]
Stuart Pilkington has assembled his favorite emerged and emerging photographers. The landing page features a guy in a wizard raincoat, so naturally, we approve. [Someone I know]
Huh? Online-editions site Artspace buys VIP Art, which launched the first online-only art fair in 2011. [Gallerist NY]
apexart’s Franchise, an annual open call for curatorial projects taking place outside New York, is now online. Winning submissions will receive project funding and administrative support. [apexart]
So weird. “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” at The Met, includes mannequins dressed in turn of the century garb. Walter Robinson says it gives the show a bit of a shop quality, but the paintings are great, so it still gets the thumbs up. [ArtSpace]
Following Bard’s successful low-residency MFA model, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago has announced a summer-only studio program. [The School of the Art Institute]
This was published back in January, but we just discovered it, and we love it. Advice Is Futile. [The Awl]
President Obama wants you to know that he, too, feels the pinched by the economy, and will be taking a voluntary 5% pay cut. [New York Magazine]
The International Center for Photography (ICP) was awarded $125,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to launch a photography conference. The first session is called “What is a photograph?” Whyyyy? [ICP]
The Elephant Room is back! Nothing is better than rocker magicians. Show dates: April 4, 6, 10, 11, 13, 18, and 20. [The Elephant Room]
