The Whitney Museum has a new cheeseball logo. They’ve also redesigned the site. That much, is a considerable improvement. The site however, loads slow. [The Whitney]
Museums for everybody! Abba gets one, so what the hell, Paula Deen Museum. [LA Times]
Paul D’Agostino interviews the Bushwick Open Studios [BOS] organizers about what’s in store this year. Most of it reads like PR, but we weren’t aware of BOS’s CinemaSunday programming, so it’s worth a read regardless. Apparently there will be a screening for the “”The Pizzatrope,” a how-to guide for combining early animation techniques, gifs, and pizza.” [The L Mag]
The IRS is unhappy with Glafira Rosales, the Long Island dealer who sold abstract expressionist paintings many now believe to be fake to Knoedler gallery. Knoedler closed two years ago, when they received their first lawsuit over the authenticity of the paintings. Now Rosales is charged with falsifying tax returns and failing to disclose a foreign bank account to the IRS. [In the Air]
BREAKING: Complex reports that Pratt’s giving its hundreds of resident cats the boot this week, prompting an outcry from nearly 1700 community cat lovers on Change.org– to no avail. Two cats have been granted amnesty. The hundreds of others will live with the school’s engineer Conrad Milster. Keep the cats. [Change.org, Complex]
GIF inventor Steve Wilhite used his life time achievement award speech time at the Webby Awards to let the world know he’d like us to pronounce the file format as he intended, “JIF.” Us GIF nerds have known this for years—it’s on the Wikipedia page—but I don’t think even a high-profile speech is going to turn this boat around. “GIF” makes more sense. [Animal]
After Time Out Chicago axed their full-time art critic, a flurry of criticism arose about how many full-time art critics are actually out there, and whether freelance critics count. Gallerist NY adds to this debate just by simply stating what critic Deborah Solomon stated on WNYC this week, that there are fewer than ten full-time art critics writing for newspapers. Yes, we know this, but many freelancers out there are upset that “full-time art critic” doesn’t refer to online publications or those who write for several. It’s an issue of legitimacy in the eyes of changing media. For that debate, just take a look at the comments section to this piece. [Gallerist NY]
Greg Allen is no fan of Architecture Firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Hirschhorn design, “The Bubble”. Liz Diller wonders if the museum could be an agent for cultural diplomacy and proceeds to present a structure designed to house expensive events like TED, the WEF, and CFR fora. Why ask the question, if the purpose of the venue won’t ever answer the question. [Greg.org]
E-book revenue increased by 42% last year. Art publications are still harder to find for my Kindle than your fill-in-the blank bestseller. [The Los Angeles Times]
Fewer couples are having kids in the states, but they’re making way for more puppies. U-S-A! [The Atlantic]
Bushwick Open Studios starts next week, and runs from May 31st through June 2nd. Here’s the map of the 587 studios listed so far. [Arts in Bushwick]
Hennessy Youngman has come out with his second lo-fi mix this year, CVS Bangers Vol. 2. Listen to the mellow 80s tracks you’d hear while filling your cart up with Mac ‘n’ Cheez Whiz, interrupted by a blaring airhorn, then Hennessy-designed ads, then someone saying “Obama”. Just Obama. [Soundcloud via Twitter]
The Asia Society has hired a new President, Josette Sheeran, vice chair of the World Economic Forum. [The Wall Street Journal]
The Met just appointed a new curator to its Department of Medieval Art and the Cloisters, C. Griffith Mann, since the Cleveland Museum of Art’s chief curator. He’ll be bumping up current curator Peter Barnet to senior curator of that department. [Cleveland.com]
Andrew Rice on Contemporary Artist Damien Hirst’s falling market. Lots of great quotes from Hirst’s former Financial Advisor, Frank Dunphy. [Business Week]
We learned a lot about Donald Judd, thanks to art critic Jerry Saltz and Architecture Critic Justin Davidson, who’ve made a trip to his restored loft. [Vulture]
Michael Kimmelman, a former art critic-turned-architecture-critic for the Times brought the Madison Square Garden lease renewal to the forefront in his February column. It’s now May, and the debate still rages. MSG doesn’t want to leave. [Curbed]
The Committee to Save the NYPL offers a point-by-point rebuttal to the New York Public Library, in the fight to keep the NYPL from demolishing the stacks and sending most of its inventory into offsite storage, for circulation in a Central Library Plan. [SaveNYPL.org]
Another good day for the like economy: Yahoo has now officially bought tumblr, in a deal estimated to be worth $1.1 billion. They promised “not to screw it up” like flickr. Worpress’ Matt Mullenweg thinks it was a steal, Forbes’ Peter Cohan says they overpaid. [NPR]
Facebook’s been getting similar criticism since it bought Instagram last year for $1 billion, and has yet to see a return. [Time]
Wordpress founder founder Matt Mullenweg already says he’s seeing user backlash against tumblr, says TheVerge: “imports [of individual posts] from Tumblr to WordPress rose from the typical rate of 400-600 per hour to over 72,000.” [TheVerge]
Our twitter is flooding with updates this morning from the #AAM2013, the American Alliance of Museums conference and awards ceremony. Look at @Juliahalperin and @ArielHudes for the bullet points. [#AAM2013]
Museums are hiring for high-level curatorial positions. [AAM jobs]
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]
A chicken has been slaughtered in the name of art. Heads have rolled. ARTINFO’s Sky Goodden breaks down the event, the aftermath and the precedents. [ARTINFO]
Smoking pot will give you a skinny waist. There’s probably some other factors contributing to the overall weight of pot smokers, but they’re definitely not as interesting. Now, like a make-you-feel-better pill or healthy vitamin, you can take your pot in liquid form. Sluurrrp. [The Daily Beast]
65 year old artist Eric Fischl tells The New York Times he’s been trying to “grow up”. He’s promoting his new memoir Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas so he’s been talking to a lot of publications lately. [NYTimes]
Isabella Rossellini as a hamster eating her young in a new web series “Mamas,” and she is amazing at it. [Paper Mag]
This morning Reuters journalist Felix Salmon showed up on Democracy Now for a roundtable discussion with Cooper Union board member Mark Epstein and current student Victoria Sobel. [Democracy Now, Twitter via @felixsalmon, student @VictoriaSobel]
Hrag Vartanian produced a great GIF of Christie’s auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen last night. Also, rich people bought more contemporary art than ever before! Total sale from last night’s auction: $495 million. [Hyperallergic]
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]
"Quizoola!," Image courtesy of Agnieszka Gratza and Frieze
A review of Quizoola!, a performance by the experimental theatre company Forced Entertainment, begins thusly: “It’s 4am and I’m struggling to stay awake while two people made up as clowns throw questions and answers each other’s way. ‘How do spark plugs and three-prong plugs work?’ I try to process this but it’s more than my battered brain can handle at this hour. The show began practically on the stroke of midnight and I’ve got 20 more hours to get through.” Here’s hoping they end up at Performa. [Frieze]
Finally, a bidding war we can get behind. Leonardo DiCaprio hosted a free-for-all, celebrity-packed auction last night at Christie’s for his environmental charity, which pulled in nearly $31.7 million. Artists donating get a tax write-off [on materials], Leo gets his tiger painting, dicks are measured, and the planet sees another day. Everyone came out on top it seems, even Dan Duray, who emerged with some very juicy sound bytes. [Gallerist]
Josh Baer’s heard that Christie’s has withdrawn a group of approximately 10 works from their upcoming Latin American sale under questions of authenticity. [Baer Faxt]
Hyperallergic’s been killing it lately. A nice longread from Alexis Clements on self marketing as an artist and the NEA 4. [Hyperallergic]
Angelina Jolie has had a double mastectomy. Her op-ed about the procedure runs in the Times today. [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]
Save Cooper Union! A large group of Cooper students and three faculty members have taken over President Jamshed Bharucha’s office, in the hopes of forcing his resignation. They report to Gothamist that they’re willing to stay as long as necessary. While Bharucha inherited massive debt, some off-the-record reports make it sound an awful lot like he’s got blood on his hands. You can follow Free Cooper Union on twitter, livestream, and facebook.
Save the library! Mira Schor reported from a small, poorly-attended protest yesterday to save the New York Public Library, and from the sounds of it, it’s not going well. The Central Library Plan involves demolishing the historic stacks and shipping 1.5 million books to a storage space in New Jersey. [A Year of Positive Thinking]
Speaking of student debt, Occupy presents Debt Fair: artist DIY booths throughout the city, with checks payable to the artist’s bank. [debtfair]
It’s official: come fall, Postmasters will open in its new home at 54 Franklin Street in Tribeca, a 4,500-square-foot ground floor space with Corinthian columns and sofas. [Postmasters]
Running for mayor seems like a game of who can apologize the most. In a public forum held this week, New York mayoral candidate Joe Lhota apologized for waging war with the Brooklyn Museum in the 1990s. While deputy mayor to Rudy Giuliani, the city pulled the museum’s funding; in turn, the museum sued. Lhota then went on to put his foot in his mouth during the same conference, referring to the Port Authority police force as “mall cops”. [New York Daily News]
There’s some secret art to be found at Chelsea’s Waterside Park Playground. From 4-8 PM on Friday, the park will be home to Jasper Spicero’s “Open Shape”, an undercover exhibition of 3-D printed objects. Here’s what “Open Shape” looked like in Wichita, Kansas. [Jasper Spicero]
The Guggenheim’s “Gutai: Splendid Playground” closed yesterday, but Ben Davis summed up the entire exhibition quite nicely. Gutai fizzled out in the early 1970s due to a split among factions: those who didn’t mind making tech-inspired work for government-sponsored exhibitions, and those who thought that conflicted with their progressive ideals. Today, Davis writes, Western artists are only beginning to understand Gutai’s lesson: “the price paid when critical art becomes repurposed as high-tech entertainment.” [ARTINFO]
The National Design Awards have been announced. [cooperhewitt]
From Alex Bag & Patterson Beckwith's "Unicorns & Rainbows"
“Long may the monkey king ride the seas of commerce on his dolphin, and long may Gagosian attend him.” Jonathan Jones on why Jeff Koons is a better artist than Damien Hirst. [The Guardian]
There is at least one performance artist in the world who is bankrolling it, and now she has bought a $2.65 million apartment in SoHo. Dayum, Marina. [Curbed NY]
Postmasters has moved across the street from Kansas in Tribeca. They’ve got a 4500 square foot space. [Postmasters]
The saga that never ends: Eugenia and Nicholas Taubman are suing the Knoedler Gallery, Michael Hammer, Ann Freedman, Glafira Rosales and Jose Carlos Bergantinos Diaz alleging they were sold a fake Clyfford Still for $4.3 million. This is one suit of many that have been lodged recently against Knoedler. [Justia Court Dockets and Filings. Via: Baer Faxt]
Alex Bag and Patterson Beckwith have released a series of clips from their late-night mid-nineties public access show “Unicorns & Rainbows.” There’s not exactly one stand-out here, but if you like the grunge over cute baby animals, then this is your program. [Sex Magazine] Also, Petland’s sign hasn’t changed in 20 years.
Sotheby’s held its Impressionist and Modern Art sale last night and Paul Cezanne took home the top-selling lot with his 1889 still-life Les Pommes. Those are some $37 million dollar apples. Also to note: LL Cool J was there. [Artnet Tumblr]
Stranger danger! If left unattended, your house painter just might steal your Picasso. [The Wall Street Journal]
