Paddy Johnson is the founding editor of Art Fag City. In addition to her work on the blog, she has been published in New York Magazine, artreview.com, Art in America, The Daily, Print Magazine, Time Out NY, The Reeler, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, and New York Press, and linked to by publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Boing-Boing, The New York Observer, Gawker, Design Observer, Make Magazine, The Awl, Artinfo, and we-make-money-not-art. Paddy lectures widely about art and the Internet at venues including Yale University, Parsons, Rutgers, South by Southwest, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2008, she became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital Foundation. Paddy is also the art editor at The L Magazine, where she writes a regular column.
You like art. You know nothing about it. Where to start?
How about our beginners art reading list! This list is for all the friends over the years who have asked me what they should read to learn about art and the art world. No one wants to flip through a text book to learn about art. You won’t have to, with these books.
Reviews of the Met’s Punk show seem unilaterally negative so far. The Times, Gallerist, ArtInfo and Hyperallergic don’t like it (an understatement for Hyperallergic’s Geraldine Visco). My review comes out in the L Magazine next week.
Gawker reporter John Cook has seen a video of a man he’s told is smoking crack cocaine. He believes that man is Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. Toronto Star reporters are claiming to have seen the video too. Ford’s denies the allegations and has had his lawyers send Gawker an email threatening legal action. Gawker has responded by posting the request. [Gawker]
Relatedly, Rob Ford is the worst mayor Toronto ever. [Wikipedia]
Tom Moody isolates the 180-degree rule as important in an essay about GIFs as micro-cinema. “Both [Bruce Conner's] A MOVIE and these animated gifs employ some common cinematic principles. The cuts create an eyeline match, which make it appear as though the characters are looking at one another, and obey the 180-degree rule (meaning that if you draw a straight line between their eyes, our perspective stays to one side of it).” [Indiwire: warning, there’s a 15 minute static ad that pops up before the article can be read!]
AFC Alumn Julia Halperin will be moderating an ArtsTech meetup on the Art Market. If you live in New York and aren’t in Venice, you should go to this. [ArtsTech]
Roberta Smith isn’t thrilled with the dick measuring contests going on in Chelsea between David Zwirner/Jeff Koons, Gagosian/Jeff Koons, and Hauser & Wirth/Paul McCarthy. Nonetheless, she measures, and concludes that Hauser & Wirth/Paul McCarthy has the biggest dick of them all. [NYTimes]
Critic Michael Kimmelman discusses MoMA’s plans to demolish the former Folk Art Museum, and their stepping back from said plans. He also aptly their describes the transformation of MoMA over the last decade. “Not so long ago, [MoMA] was the art museum New Yorkers loved and identified with; it seemed familial, its scale personal. It had a special place in the city’s heart. The Met was the big pompous, bureaucratic machine. Now the tables have turned, and even while it has grown, the Met has come to seem the nimble, venturesome one, more intimately loved.” [NYTimes]
Elizabeth Spiers on the loaded question: What do you do? Only one stone left unturned in this essay: Is there proper etiquette for asking the question amongst a crowd where the question might seem garish? Sometimes you want to know, and “What are your interests?” feels a little forced. [The Medium]
Museums are starting to open their permanent collections up to photography. Nice coinage by Jorge Colberg in this piece about how constantly taking photos of ourselves is an act of “compulsive looking”. [Artnews]
I could care less about who owns the rights of use to what image, but for those following the Supreme lawsuit, it seems they only filed for a federal trademark March 6th. This is significant, because they filed a suit against Leah McSweeney in the amount of 10 million dollars for copyright infringement without the trademark, just one month later. [Animal NY]
A revised version of Space Oddity recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station. It’s ridiculously good. [youtube]
A great interactive “Then and now” piece about hip-hop in brooklyn. [NYTimes via: c-monstah]
The Avant/Garde Dairies should interview more historians. Barry Lewis, an architectural historian, who speaks like he’s been lecturing at institutions across the country all his life, is the subject of their latest segment and he’s absolutely captivating.
Here, he discusses the Jefferson Market Courthouse, a library made of red brick that’s located in Greenwich Village. “What could be avant garde about that?” Lewis asks rhetorically before explaining the long forgotten taboos of the 19th century. At the time exposing the structural materials such as brick was simply not done; architects were expected to place such materials behind beautified walls.
Hurray! MonkeyTown, the avant garde screening, performance and dining venue is back! This summer, MonkeyTown will enjoy a 60 day run at Eyebeam. There’ll be chefs, there’ll be videos, there’ll even be an all terrine menu. I spoke to MonkeyTown Founder Montgomery Knott this week, and asked him about the program. Our interview is now up at The L Magazine.
I’ve cleared my calendar of all Derby Day events tomorrow, so I have the day to attend the annual Derby Day fundraiser at Smack Mellon. I like gambling, and they’ve got plenty of that; horse racing bidding will determine the order party attendees can chose the art they’ll take home. Spend $250 on a ticket and you’ll be sure to get something.
Internet Archive will be accepting applications for week-long Tumblr residencies through June 1st. In an facebook conversation transcribed to Alt Crit, artist Nicholas O’Brien says he thinks the platform homogenizes aesthetic for the sake of individual “curatorial sensibilities”. Internet Archive’s Ian Aleksander Adams disagrees.
Rhizome’s Seven on Seven is, by definition, a crap shoot. The conference runs with the basic premise that by pairing seven technologists with seven artists and sticking them in a room together for 24 hours, a few creative sparks might fly. The following day, Rhizome hosts a six hour long conference in which the pairs are given 30 minutes each to present their collaborative work. The results are predictably mixed. Some projects fail, many have potential, but almost none amount to anything at all. Acknowledging this, Seven on Seven Moderator John Michael Boling quickly conceded during his opening remarks that “the main deliverable here is conversation.”
Scott King is a UK-based artist who’s produced a delicious send up of the New York art world, rife with Canadian music and art influences. Think Peaches meets the political Canadian artist collective and electro-pop band Hooded Fang and you’ve got your track. As a Canadian living in New York with anglophile tendencies, naturally, I love it.
Take a few minutes out of your day for this. Things start to get really good around the 1:50 mark. I’m not issuing any spoilers, but there’s this; “Dan Colen, pigeon shit”. h/t Andrew Russeth
“Don’t move to New York,” I told an audience of young students at the University of Georgia last week. To my surprise, most of the students were already familiar with my thoughts on the matter—I’d forgotten about a conversation I’d had with local artist and MFA graduate Layet Johnson, who’d called to ask me if he should move to New York. That conversation became part of an installation in a hotel show. It’s a small town, so by the time I’d arrived, the entire student body had listened to the piece.
Still, the topic came up again and again during my stay, and part of it was my own doing. I’m sad that New York, the city I’ve lived in for more than 10 years, is now barely hospitable to those making the kind of art I love. It’s my job, though I don’t like it, to tell young artists thinking of moving that without connections, their job prospects are dim. The ugly reality is the cost of living is prohibitively expensive in New York.
Paddy Johnson, Editorial Director
