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Monday Links: Cindy Cheng Wins Sondheim Prize, “Art Barbie” Fails to Win Art Battle L.A.

by Michael Anthony Farley on July 17, 2017

Frida Davidsson, winner of Art Battle Los Angeles. Image via @fridadavidssonart Instagram, [h/t artnet News]

There’s now a booming outlet for fanfic, including stories “portraying a near future where the Trump administration has criminalized selfies, radicalizing Kim Kardashian as a freedom fighter for women’s rights.” The Toronto startup Wattpad has moved the online subculture closer to the mainstream publishing world, and former AFC editor Rea McNamara has written a fascinating profile on the subculture and its transition. [NOW]
Designer Raul Lopez has deconstructed the uniforms of corporate America into genderless cubist forms and they’re amazing. [Vogue]
The Broad’s upcoming exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors is expected to be a huge blockbuster when it opens on October 21. The museum announced yesterday that they’ll be pre-selling all 50,000 tickets for the show online on September 1st at noon. I’d be worried about servers crashing from that volume of traffic. [Los Angeles Times]
In other L.A. news, Art Battle just took place in the Arts District and it sounds like it was terrible. It’s a live painting competition, which involved lots of paintings of pop culture things, dollar signs, hearts, and someone named “Art Barbie”. [artnet News]
Wow. Add this to the bucket list: the late French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle left behind a 14 acre sculpture park in Tuscany inspired by Gaudi’s Park Güell. Her “Tarot Garden” is populated by giant goddess figures and a feminist takes on the tarot deck. This looks really cool. [Artsy]
Hong Kong high school students just set a world record for a display of 1,214 3D-printed sculptures of buildings from the city’s skyline. It kinda looks like a Won Ju Lim installation! (The 3D printing marathon was organized to celebrate the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to mainland Chinese rule… which has been a less than great thing so far for the city’s pro-democracy activists, but that’s another story). [South China Morning Post]
Congrats to Cindy Cheng, winner of the 2017 Sondheim Prize of $25,000. (As a curator, I’ve worked with Cheng before and can vouch that she totally deserves it!) Here, Angela N. Carroll, Bret McCabe, and Cara Ober discuss all the finalists. [BmoreArt]

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Thursday Links: Hitler’s Painting in Museum “A Piece of S***”

by Michael Anthony Farley on March 16, 2017

A painting by Adolf Hitler. It’s “a piece of shit”.

Italian art critic Vittorio Sgarbi has curated an exhibition about art and madness at Museo Di Salo in Lombardy. The most high-profile inclusion in the show: a rarely-seen painting by Adolf Hitler that Sgarbi describes as “a piece of shit”. [The Telegraph]
This is the best museum-related news we’ve heard in a long time. The Museum of the Dog is moving back to New York after relocating to St. Louis (really?) in 1987. Expect so much dog art. [NBC New York]
Yay! Trump’s latest travel ban has been shot down by a federal judge, again. [The New York Times]
And the bad news: Trump’s proposed budget is really bad for the arts, the EPA, and poor people. But great for the military industrial complex. Defense first, obviously, because once we’re a toxic shithole of a country devoid of culture or social infrastructure everyone else will just be lining up to invade. [The Washington Post]
Ronald Hollar has been charged by Des Moines police after drunkenly crashing his car into one of that city’s most beloved public artworks. [KCCI Des Moines]
Julian Opie and Lisson Gallery are prepping for Opie’s first major show in China, at Shanghai’s Fosun Foundation. Honestly, I had mostly forgotten about Opie. I wonder if that’s because his work seems so dated as a result of how much it influenced turn-of-the-millennium graphic design. I can’t look at one of his paintings without seeing a painfully hip early 00s Granta “best of” anthology cover. Maybe Chinese audiences won’t be as jaded to his style? [Newsweek]
Versailles is changing its contemporary art program. After recent controversies surrounding their solo art-star exhibitions (Anish Kapoor, anyone?) the French landmark is shifting to a group show model. Whoever thought people would consider curating group shows as a lower-drama alternative? [artnet News]

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The 10 Weirdest AFC Stories of 2016

by Michael Anthony Farley on December 30, 2016

Equal parts surreal and horrifying, 2016 was basically an Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life. Given how apocalyptic and strange every headline from the mainstream news media has been this past year, it’s easy to overlook all the weird shit that went down in the art world.

But this year was chock-full of crazy art world stories, often that intersected with politics. (Remember a few weeks ago, when Madonna charged Art Basel visitors thousands of dollars to watch her grind on a chair while dressed as a clown, covering Britney Spears’ “Toxic” in front of a giant projection of Donald Trump?) It’s hard to even pick a “top 10”, but here’s our best effort to round-up the weirdest art stories we reported on in 2016:

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Tuesday Links: Imelda Marcos Collected More than Just Shoes, Chinese Artists Arrested

by Michael Anthony Farley on December 13, 2016

McDonald’s daring homage to contemporary art. pic.twitter.com/wjNrAz9rI8

— Giovanni Tiso (@gtiso) December 11, 2016

The Philippines has spent three decades trying to track down the illegally-purchased art collection of late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos and his wife Imelda. Now they’re taking to the web, using the hashtag #ShowMeTheMonet. [The New York Times]
The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016 is designed to make it easier for rightful heirs to claim Nazi-looted artwork in the United States. [Smithsonian]
The New York Times has retired its weekly “Inside Art” column, to be replaced by a new series, “Show Us Your Wall,” which will profile different collectors in their homes. This is supposed to target a broad audience. The “Arts, Briefly” column will now run six days a week. [ARTnews]
Has anyone else seen Walter Robinson: A Retrospective at Jeffrey Deitch? David Ebony seems to like the show, claiming Robinson infused some heart into pop subject matter. The review makes me want to see the work for myself, which is always a good thing. [Art in America]
A group of artists in Chengdu, China have been arrested for a performance protesting out-of-control air pollution. Their criminal act? Walking around the city center en masse wearing filtration masks. [BBC News]
“Ghost Ship is our Fields Triangle factory fire.” Eva Wingren attributes the tragedy in Oakland to gentrification and housing injustice. She relates this to the recent eviction of the Bell Foundry artists in Baltimore, and a model of collective ownership that’s been a successful alternative. [Rooflines]

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Tuesday Links: This Is the Last Day of the Election from Hell

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on November 8, 2016

election

It sucks to work in admissions at this art school in Taiyuan, China. Here are photos of the school’s application process—which involves walking around a hangar-sized building full of 15,000 virtually identical paintings to be graded. [Daily Mail]
“Trump has built his name on his special combination of blandness and opulence, with complete blindness toward anything that makes architecture with a capital A.” Architect and critic Doug Stalker throws some serious shade at “Trumpitecture” in this op-ed. [Dezeen]
Stephen Hibberts bought a trampled, falling-apart painting at a French market for about $450. Now, he suspects it might be a Raphael. [National Post]
Photographer and writer Chris Arnade put 100,000 miles on his car and talked to voters in low income neighborhoods and photographed them. Yesterday he tweeted some of their stories. [@chris_arnade]
Author and Modern Art Notes podcast host Tyler Green is posting art by American women all day on twitter in support of Hillary Clinton. [@tylergreendc]
Anti-Donald Trump quarters are popping up around the country. That’s the whole story. [Hyperallergic]
Los Angeles is launching a new billboard design from Tom Wiscombe Architecture that aims to combine advertising, sculptural public space, and digital artworks. It’s weird and seems like something that should be in a fountain in a Las Vegas porte-cochère. [The Guardian]
The 24th annual Canstruction NY exhibition and competition has produced some crazy sculptures made out of canned food. NYC’s pizza rat has been immortalized, as has the Guggenheim Museum of Art. [Curbed]
I (Michael) will never forgive myself for missing Tom Sachs’ Space Program: Mars at the Armory in 2012. But maybe this installation from National Geographic is a decent knock-off? Nat Geo had a faux-Mars-mission pop up in Trafalgar Square to promote their new documentary series about the red planet. [Irish Examiner]

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Wednesday Links: the Astor Place Cube Returns, the Albright Knox Get $100 Million, Tumblr Witches Divided

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on November 2, 2016

astor-place

The latest artwork to be launched into space are two manga murals on a Japanese rocket from cartoonist Chuya Koyama. The idea is to get kids excited about “the wonders of the universe.” [phys.org]
Due to Chinese cities’ slash-and-burn style gentrification, in which whole neighborhoods might be demolished for a development, artists are flocking to the nondescript Beijing suburb Yanjiao. Are dystopian-looking cheap condo towers the new warehouses? [The New York Times]
Tony Rosenthal’s “Alamo”, better known as the Astor Place cube, is finally back! New Yorkers are thrilled, and Nicole Puglise cites the city’s enthusiasm as evidence that public art is important. [The Guardian]
Crain’s asked a dozen of NYC’s top architecture firms for ideas to help the city absorb so much new growth. Most of them are pretty good—especially the outer borough transit ideas. Others not so much—is a hotel at the Javits Center really a priority? And can we please make preserving manufacturing/workspaces a part of the discussion rather than always viewing industrial land as “underutilized”? [Crain’s]
Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw has won the prestigious Sobey Prize. Who is he and what does he make? From the report, “Working in a variety of media, Shaw explores altered states and the cultural and scientific practices that aspire to map transcendental experience by creating a post-documentary space in which contrasting ideals and belief systems are put into crisis.” I (Paddy) haven’t even seen the work, but this garbled and pretentious statement makes me want to hate it. [artnet News]
Uruguayan gallerist Diana Saravia was summoned to a police station after displaying a painting by Julio de Sosa that depicted former president José “Pepe” Mujica and his wife, senator Lucía Topolansky, as nude Adam & Eve. The police also confiscated the painting. She’s justifiably upset. What gives Uruguay? [Artforum]
Well, this is depressing. Here’s what $1,400 a month rent will get you in NYC right now. [Curbed]
This Julia Halperin story on how the Albright Knox raised $100 million in three months is just nuts. Last April Janne Sirén, the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, got an email billionaire Jeffrey Gundlach pledging an insane amount of money towards their $80 million capital campaign. Gundlach, who had never donated to the institution gave $42.5m and the museum’s trustees pledged $21.3m this summer. Halperin says the rate of giving works out to over 1 million a day. Sirén had met Gundlach only once the year before, had not been in touch since, but did remember to send his mother flowers on Mother’s Day. Executive Directors, take note. [The Art Newspaper]
We couldn’t be more thrilled for the art collective Current Space, who just bought their building (and one next to it!) from the city of Baltimore for $1. They’re the best, and now they finally have a permanent home! Read about that process in this interview with the collective’s Co-Director Michael Benevento. [Bmore Art]
Headline of the week: “Boneghazi: How a Grave-Robbing Controversy Tore an Online Witch Community Apart.” The piece is a mind-blowing look at the identity politics of Tumblr culture. [Broadly.]

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Thursday Links: Storm Systems of Art and Politics

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on October 20, 2016

From James Bridle’s “Cloud Index” website.

Surprise, surprise. Ryder Ripps, the artist known for his Donald Trump-like vacuous chest thumping and misogynistic paintings was interviewed last night as a Donald Trump supporter. His biggest concern? The wall between Mexico and the US. “I just hope they build it high enough,” he said. “Because people climb walls.” The artist then updated his Facebook to brag about duping a reporter into believing he was a Trump supporter when he actually supports Bernie Sanders. [The Guardian]

Dezeen is a blog we enjoy for many reasons, including their weekly round up of notoriously snarky reader comments. This one might just take the cake. Responding to a reverse-vaulted pizzeria interior, reader TFO remarked “I feel violated. Cis male architecture sitting on my face.” Architecture criticism is starting to look a lot like art criticism. [Dezeen]

Thinking of funding your brilliant project through Kickstarter? Maybe reconsider… factories in China are ripping off design ideas from the internet before they even hit their own production start. [Quartz]

So, that naked statue of Donald Trump mostly elicited plenty of laughs (and one high-profile theft) but when a similar sculpture of nude Hillary Clinton was erected in Downtown Manhattan this week it caused a minor violent street brawl. A National Museum of the American Indian employee (identified only as “Nancy”) toppled the sculpture by Anthony Scioli (maybe?) and enacted a pretty comical tug-of-war with the artist that ended with Nancy sitting on top of it. Of all the borderline hilarious/cringe-worthy confrontations this trainwreck of an election has stoked, this art fight is probably the most of both. [New York Daily News]

Bethany “Sick Din” Dinsick is seeking music videos from artists for a screening at Bushwick’s Otion Front Studios on November 1st. Email her submissions at bdinsick@gmail.com. [Facebook]

Can anyone else figure out James Bridle’s “Cloud Index”? The artwork/website maps cloud patterns to potential outcomes of the Brexit vote, and talks about cloud seeding as a form of propaganda, as well as cloud computing. It’s a really pretty website, but what exactly is the relationship between the clouds and the vote? It brings Spurious Correlations to mind. [Serpentine Gallery]

Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde’s smog-eating mini-tower has come to Beijing. In tests in Rotterdam, it sucked about 60% of pollutants from a small area, which were then made into jewelry. In far more polluted Beijing, however, data on its effectiveness won’t be made public. [Forbes] According to Chinese press, the tower (which is installed in the capital’s 798 arts district) hasn’t really impressed locals. [ECNS]

Carolina Miranda reports on why memes have greater currency this election than artwork. [Culture: High & Low]

Amid investigations of corruption and money laundering, the US Justice Department has seized some pretty valuable paintings from Jho Low, an aide to the Malaysian Prime Minister. Now art dealer David Nahmad, of Monaco, is claiming a Monet in the collection actually belongs to him. Although he attempted to sell the painting to Low, and received a $2 million wire transfer, he reports that the deal fell through. This story ought to get juicier as it develops. [International Business Times]

Turns out there’s lots of poisonous heavy metals in paint. Not exactly a surprise, and the writer doesn’t seem to understand that while cobalt blue is more expensive and toxic than its cheaper cousin french ultramarine blue, there are actual differences in the color. It’s useful, though, because it does offer examples of colors made with heavy metals and their knockoffs. [The Observer]

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Tuesday Links: Umbilical Cord Art is a Thing

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on September 13, 2016

“Umbilical cord art” is now a trend, according to Buzzfeed.

Strangest headline of the day: “Why I Won’t Judge Women For Making Umbilical Cord Art”. [Refinery29]

Berlin’s legendary nightclub Berghain has been deemed a “high art” institution by German courts. This entitles the club to pay a lower tax rate than an “entertainment” business. ARTnews defends this “art v.s. entertainment” decision by pointing out that Art21 host Claire Danes is a fan of Berghain. But seriously, cities should be doing more to help keep their nightlife afloat. [ARTnews]

Alec Baldwin has escalated his dispute with Mary Boone and is now suing the gallery over a Ross Bleckner painting. Baldwin had approached Boone in the hopes of acquiring Bleckner’s 1996 work “Sea and Mirror.” Instead of tracking that down, Boone just sold Baldwin another, identical version of the painting, also by Bleckner. [artnet News]

Tommy Hilfiger is throwing a fashion-show-cum-carnival on a pier. This is just one of the “unconventional” venues for NYFW shows this year, ranging from public spaces to Department of Sanitation salt storage sheds (yes, really). [Curbed]

Melania Trump used $20,000 of the Donald J. Trump Foundation’s funds to buy a six-foot-tall portrait of the Donald by “speed painter” Michael Israel. To be fair, this was at an auction benefitting a charity for children. But The Washington Post reports that it’s one of many shady dealings at the Foundation. [Hyperallergic]

The Finnish government has refused state funding for the €130 million Guggenheim Helsinki. Several of the politicians who opposed the new museum outpost argued that they would support a privately-funded Guggenheim, but that the Finnish government’s share of construction costs would not be an appropriate use of state funds. [Dezeen]

10 songs that help Pitchfork staffers get shit done. This is the epitome of a music nerd/writer listening list—mostly instrumental and heavy on drone. Pretty much the opposite of anything we’d use to motivate, expect perhaps Daft Punk’s Alive and Rhythm & Sound’s The Versions. [Pitchfork]

Democratic New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo shies away from criticizing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump by name. [Politico]

Shortly after the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro contrived to convert the grounds of an elite golf course into a series of national art schools, housed in creative architecture designed around economic restrictions such as an embargo on imported US steel. Unfortunately, the campus became abandoned and neglected. Today, it’s one of many culturally significant sites in the country that face preservation challenges from the coming tourism boom. It would be so great to see this complex restored and put to use as an art school. Knowing the impact tourism has had on other islands in the Caribbean, though, it wouldn’t be too surprising to see the site ironically returned to use as a golf course, unfortunately. [The Art Newspaper]

Chinese social media users are bashing painter Guo Jia, accusing her of destroying historic frescos she had been tasked with restoring. We can’t find any before-or-after images of her work, but is this the Chinese equivalent of Spain’s “Beast Jesus” in-the-making? [China Daily]

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Monday Links: The British Are Coming

by Paddy Johnson and Rhett Jones on July 11, 2016

Sophie Michael, The Watershow Extravaganza, 2016 courtesy of Seventeen Gallery

London’s Seventeen Gallery will be opening a space on Bowery in what some are seeing as a migration inspired by the International Center of Photography opening near the New Museum. Seventeen has a pretty nice lineup of artists, including Paul B. Davis, Sophie Michael and Oliver Laric. [Bowery Boogie]
In what is probably not a coincidence, a self-portrait of Frida Kahlo standing on the border of the U.S. and Mexico will be coming to Philadelphia just 2 weeks before the presidential election. We’re guessing it will be viewed quite differently depending on which candidate is elected. [Art Newspaper]
LACMA is acquiring 39 major lithographs from the legendary L.A. print shop, Gemini. The acquisition includes works by Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha and Frank Stella. [Los Angeles Times]
Douglas Gordon has completed a feature about the patriarch of experimental film, Jonas Mekas. It will premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. Not much is known about the piece but the festival’s director says that “Douglas Gordon offers us a truly sensorial experience, which challenges the concept of seeing, and links the idea of the present with that of memory.” Gordon’s previous feature work, “Zidane: A Self Portrait” was an extremely unique approach to portraiture and biography, so the idea of him taking on Mekas is pretty exciting. [Art News] [Opinions belong to Rhett, Paddy does not agree.]
The photograph of a weeping officer that became one of the most iconic images from the Dallas police shooting last week was by an intern at the The Dallas Morning News. [Columbia Journalism Review]
This mirrored library in Yangzhou, China looks like some sort of unholy marriage between the Starship Enterprise and Hogwarts. [Curbed]
Speaking of the Starship Enterprise, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum has opened an elaborate, interactive Star Trek exhibition. Yes, it’s basically a commercial for the new series that launches next year. But, it’s also a chance to find out what position you’d be given as a Starfleet cadet. [New York Times]
Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art has a new CEO. Terry Nicholson, the former director of arts and culture of the City of Toronto, will replace Chantal Pontbriand, who left after only eight months on the job. This appointment seems like a step in the right direction. Nicholson has worked with the institution before and has a long history of successfully pulling projects out of the fire. [The Toronto Star]
The Brooklyn Museum’s anti-gentrification forum was rescheduled this weekend due to an air-conditioning outage that forced the museum to close. It will now take place Sunday July 26th. In the meantime, Ben Davis gives some context to the event and offers a few highlights to look forward to. [artnet News]
Making the rounds: This Warhol style screen print of Donald Trump, with the words “Vote Hillary” inscribed below. The piece is by Deborah Kass. [Facebook]
From Hugo Ball to Kanye West, The Times’ staff takes a look at the history of Dada on its 100th anniversary. [New York Times]
The best thing on the Internet right now: bearcam! We spent most of the weekend watching bears patiently wait for salmon to fly into their mouths in katmai national park, alaska Alaska river. It’s early morning, and as I write this there is only one bear on the cam and a million salmon flying through the air. A good breakfast will be had. [Explore]

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