Outside the Trump Tower
- Jerry Saltz discusses Andreas Gursky’s “Amazon”, a photograph taken inside an Amazon warehouse in Phoenix, as it pertains to the election. Saltz describes the photograph as depicting the “almost-unknowable patterns of contemporary mass consumption and the hyper-distribution of goods.” Seems like this photograph really has scale going for it. It’s 81.5 × 160.25 inches. [Vulture]
- Retail sales on 57th and 5th street are way down thanks to the Trump Tower security for the president-elect’s family—which is now advertising the security as a draw. That means galleries in that neighborhood such as Tibor de Nagy, Marian Goodman and Mary Boone are all being effected. Nobody is happy. [Artnet news]
- Naeem Mohaiemen, in a piece illustrated with Hans Haacke’s photos from Saadiyat Island, writes about the efforts of the Gulf Labor Coalition. From the text: “Defiance is welcomed when it is sanctioned and staged as art. Drill a crater in the floor, flood a gallery, embalm an animal, smash an object, stage a pitiful death—critics hail these gestures as having the power to “shape worlds.” But when artists sit down at a conference table with museum administrators and read from a list of demands for labor rights, this work—involving conversation, negotiation, research, protest—suddenly becomes illegible to the same museum. The artists whose projects were previously praised as stretching boundaries are now tagged as maverick spoilers.” [The Walker Museum of Art]
- Josh Baer says Brett Gorvy, the Chair of Contemporary and Post War art at Christie’s will be leaving to join the gallery Dominique Levy. [Baer Faxt]
- Does the Oakland Warehouse Fire “mean the end of these spaces in the Bay Area and with it the last vestige of any kind of affordable artists community?’” asks artist Aaron Muszalski. No real answer here, because once you make a warehouse space legal for residence the rents go up. [The New York Times]
- The Art Newspaper’s full coverage of the Art Basel Miami here. [The Art Newspaper]
