Abu Dhabi

• Another dashcam to add to the carnage, this time involving hand-to-hand/car-to-beast combat with a wild boar. [YouTube via Edward Zipco on Facebook]
• Rhizome has archived VVORK! This is significant not only because VVORK was a hallmark of its time (2006-2012), but also because Rhizome has solved the problem of archiving videos from third party websites. This is a huge problem for blogs that, say, embed YouTube videos in their daily posts. More on this soon. [Rhizome]
• Human Rights Watch has released another damning report on labor conditions in Abu Dhabi. In the report, HRW places the blame not only at the feet of the UAE and its agencies, but the businesses this labor supports; New York University, The Louvre and The Guggenheim. [Hyperallergic]
• Christian Viveros-Faune decides that MoMA’s contemporary painting survey “Forever Now” sucks. There are so many zingers in this review they are hard to count. A few: “Each of these artists’ works is the art-fair equivalent of collector catnip…Showroom-tested and market- approved, the artists in “Forever Now” don’t so much constitute an artistic style as embody so-called zombie formalism. (Critic Walter Robinson recently coined the term to describe faux-original painting that attempts to revive the “walking corpse” of Abstract Expressionism.)…Fronted by Hoptman’s abracadabra, MOMA has endorsed the 2015 painterly equivalent of Design Within Reach.” That’s just from the first page. [The Village Voice]
• For what it’s worth, when I visited Abu Dhabi this year, my UAE tour guides refused to let anyone visit the construction site of the Louvre, because they claimed Western journalists would only focus on the labor conditions. These staff were convinced that journalists only found the worst, out of date cases and chose to make an example of them. When I visited a friend at NYU Abu Dhabi, and we discussed this, I was told that while the tone of some Western journalists could be off putting, the labor conditions were a real issue and most people in this person’s circles over paid any help they had to try to correct those problems. [Paddy Johnson]
• Jon Stewart has announced that he’s leaving the Daily Show after seventeen years. [Wonkette]
• A recap of the talk Paddy Johnson gave at YoungArts last week. [Miami New Times]
• Temple Run for China looks like Final Fantasy. [The Verge]
• A long debate about the virtues of having a tiny tab on your zipper pull, a leftover from the industrial process which would save thousands of man hours and dollars, but remains because it’s aesthetically unpleasing. Instead, people work eight hour shifts to assemble perfect zippers. [Bunnies Studios, via Metafilter]
• Police in the Netherlands have busted an “industrial-scale” weed operation because it was the only house on the block without snow on the roof. [Gawker]
• Auction world insider Josh Baer, who runs a well-known up-to-the-minute art world newsletter, broke rumors about the highest-ever art sale, a Gauguin painting, on his February 3rd newsletter:

Has the record been broken for a private art sale for a single work of art?? If its true

that the Qataris have paid $300 million for Gaugin’s “Nafea Faaipoipo”, then the wags citing low oil prices as having a big effect might have….?

• The New York Times forwarded the story with a mention to Baer Faxt, but the Wall Street Journal’s Kelly Crow didn’t even give the attribution. Baer takes issue with WSJ editor Eben Shapiro and the general bad practice of ignoring the smaller outlets. [Baer Faxt newsletter 2/3/15 and 2/10/15, New York Times, Wall Street Journal]