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Thursday Links: Ways of Something, Part One

by Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball on September 11, 2014

Ways of Something – Episode 1 from Lorna Mills on Vimeo.

“Ways of Something, Part One” made its online premiere last night. Watch above.
Videos: the new hip offering for young billionaires. [Artnet News]
Artist-activists should apply right now to the Rauschenberg Foundation’s “Artist as Activist” program. They’re giving away piles and piles of money to artists committed to working with the public. Applications are due October 13th. Following grants will be awarded to help combat climate change. [The Rauschenberg Foundation]
One Amazon-published pulp novelist writes that Amazon has enabled him to produce more than he ever would have through traditional publishers, and the same is true for crime novelists, fan fiction writers, and niche writers the world over. “It’s been the most enjoyable creative burst of my career, a gleeful hack’s sprint toward nowhere in particular,” Neal Pollack writes. [Slate]
More points for Amazon: back in May, the company joined a coalition of big companies in favor of net neutrality. Sign this net neutrality petition for this blog, and all blogs. [Battle for the Net]
Just announced: Hyperplace Harlem is a three day festival featuring media and visual artists, readings, performances, workshops, and discussions that runs from October 4-6. There should be lots of tech projects here; get your nerd on. [Hyperplace]
What do you even do with 71 paintings after they’re all reported stolen? [Artnet News]
Watch-nerds review the Apple Watch. The verdict? It will disrupt the low-end watch market. “It offers so much more functionality than other digitals it’s almost embarrassing.” Read the section on the straps. Rarely have I seen such fawning. And in the “not so great” section of the review a favorite heading: Market Leader in a Category No One Really Asked For. The question posed by the author in this part of the review is whether the Apple Watch is Google’s Glass? I can answer that one right away: No. Google Glass is for assholes. [Hodinkee]
Performance artist and recently featured AFC Rising Star Rebecca Patek is featured in Animal’s notebook. [Animal New York]
Carolina Miranda talks to artist Lisa Anne Auerbach about her zines, paintings, knitting, and why cats show up in her work so much. [Culture: High & Low]
Like New York, Miami housing has also become a piggybank for the foreign rich. Is displacement potentially endless? Will every city turn into a giant empty condo? [vocativ]
Maybe not! Brooklyn’s median rent has decreased for the first time in 15 months. We’ll hold our excitement, though, since we heard similars about Manhattan last year, and little has come of those. [Curbed]
The Camera Club of New York has been around since 1884. They’re moving to 126 Baxter Street in Chinatown. [Bowery Boogie]
“Sharks are like swimming noses,” says Danielle Dixon, an assistant professor in the School of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Shark noses suffer when carbon levels rise. Sharks will die. [Treehugger]

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Monday Links: Social Media Loses; Wet Dog Wins

by Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball on May 5, 2014

Sophie Gamand, from “Wet Dog” portraits

A “Wet Dog” portrait by Sophie Gamand has won the BBC’s portraiture award. More wet dogs on her site. [Sophie Gamand]
The New Museum has announced that Google Glass will sponsor the 2015 Triennial, and the technology will be used with a custom “visitor engagement” app, which is hooked up to social media. No word yet as to how this might affect the art. [The New Museum]
Modern Art Notes is on hiatus. No big surprise there—BlouinArtInfo has been hemorrhaging writers—but a bummer nonetheless. [Modern Art Notes]
Further proof that the Knoedler scandal was not the work of a single painter, but was a pervasive industry problem. According to the Times, scholars were threatened with lawsuits, others were paid off, and not enough people asked questions. “In an industry whose transactions cry out for verification of both title to and authenticity of subject matter, it is deemed poor practice to probe into either,” wrote New York Supreme Court Judge J. Shorter. [New York Times]
The New York Times uses Jack Flam, the president of the Dedalus Foundation (the foundation for Robert Motherwell’s estate), as their art historian source for the Knoedler story. Flam has been accused by Motherwell’s friend and art historian Dore Ashton of overstepping his executive role to take liberties with the catalogue raisonée, overpaying himself, and ousting the dissenters. [Bloomberg]
One day, a poor engineer named Rob Rhinehart decided he could save money on food by heading to the internet, buying a bunch of amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates, sticking them in a blender, and using that concoction as a replacement for food. He named his magic mix, “Soylent” after the 1973 sci-fi film “Soylent Green” and after a Kickstarter that raised more $100k in two hours, he’s started a company. Is this the end of food? Rhinehart claims he’s never felt better. [The New Yorker]
Lots of talk these days about Twitter’s problems, and they aren’t or are insurmountable. They announced last week that their active users increased by only 5.8 percent from the previous quarter. This particular take sees the bulk of their problems as marketing (and stagnation due to board infighting). [Stratechery]
More evidence of widespread social media fatigue: this video about putting away your phone has gone viral. Since we watched it an hour ago, it’s already accumulated a million more views. [YouTube]
Activist shareholder Daniel Loeb has landed himself a position on Sotheby’s board in a compromise deal. [Art Market Monitor]
Apparently a lot of items going up for auction this week already have bidders. [The New York Times]
Designer Matt Daniels has measured the number of unique words in rappers’ lyrics, and found that Outkast, Blackalicious, Ghostface Killah, and Wu Tang have all beaten Shakespeare in their invention of new words. [Matt Daniels]

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Tuesday Links: That Time We All Smashed Ai Weiwei’s Vases

by Paddy Johnson and Corinna Kirsch on March 5, 2014

Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld created a supermarket for supermodels at the Grand Palais in Paris. The food was not for eatin’, so Karl “nobody wants curvy models” Lagerfeld can still keep his reputation intact. [Gawker]
Sales reports from the ADAA are already coming in. So far, so good. [The Art Market Monitor]
A job opening for an associate curator of contemporary art at the Whitney has opened up. Sweet. [The Whitney]
This year the Whitney Biennial has one work at the site of the museum’s future home. Along the Hudson River you’ll find Tony Tasset’s shipping-container-looking monument containing the names of 392,485 artists. [Artnet]
Kenneth Cole has created a Google Glass app for narcissistic do-gooders. The app encourages simple acts of kindness (buy a coffee for a stranger, send someone flowers) and then photographing those accomplishments with the hashtag manupformankind. [Mashable]
The influence of John Coltrane on artist Terry Adkins was profound. Jessica Slaven interviews Adkins before his sudden death this year. [Paper Monnument]
The Spanish artist Eugenio Merino will show a series of sculptures of dictator heads in refrigerators. The Franco Foundation is suing him for a second time for the first work in this series, which used a depiction of Generalísimo Franco’s head as a punching ball. [The Art Newspaper]
Can someone explain what’s happening with New Inc, the New Museum’s forthcoming “shared workspace and professional development program”? Please? [A Plea]
The Ai Weiwei art-smashing game. [Aiweiwhoops]

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Tuesday Links: New York’s Problems

by Paddy Johnson on October 8, 2013

Annie Leibovitz, White Stripes, New York, 2003

David Byrne threatens to leave New York City if it starts to look any more like Hong Kong or Abu Dubai than it already does. He says those places aren’t good for living. The comment section is filled with people who have moved out of New York or other large cities, after tiring of the hardship. [Creative Time Reports]
Google Glass has spawned a documentary genre. Filmmaker Mendy Seldowitz is Kickstarting his project about the Hasidic and Carribbean populations in Crown Heights, as seen through residents who volunteered to wear Google Glass for the film. Seldowitz likes that the glasses remove the influence of the filmmaker. Another plus is it’s cheap– they’re only asking for $5,000. [AnimalNY]
If you’re still wondering what the Met was thinking with “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” it was ticket sales. A breakdown of revenue generated by the Met, mainly by out-of-town visitors. [The Wall Street Journal]
Is “recommended admission” murky enough to be misleading? You can pay what you want, but two suits brought against the Metropolitan Museum last year claim that the Museum is swindling its visitors out of their money. The Met has argued that the cases have no merit and should be dismissed because the city has specifically said visitors can be charged, but the judge has not ruled yet. [The New York Times]
How much time and energy can one country waste? Hyperallergic reports that the American Family Association of Kansas and Missouri is trying for a second time to remove a headless statue with exposed breasts. It is in the midst of taking a selfie. The conservative group claims the statue encourages sexting and cost the state $35,000 trying to get it removed the first time around. In the group’s defense, the sculpture is terrible, just not for any of the reasons they’ve identified. [Hyperallergic]
New York Public Library president Tony Marx defends the Central Library Plan. Marx says the stacks are “badly deteriorated” without proper humidity and temperature controls. That’s supposed to justify demolishing the stacks, moving most of its inventory to offsite storage, and replacing them with a modern-looking revamp. Editor’s note: Also, as a former New York Public Library employee who used to work in the stacks, I can assure readers that Marx’s statement is patently false. The stacks themselves are made of a thick metal that showed zero signs of deterioration and wouldn’t unless they were stuck under water for 50 years. – PJ [NYPL.org]

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Wednesday Links: White Men, Dumb Music

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on May 1, 2013

White Men Wearing Google Glass. [Tumblr, via Jennifer Chan)
Thanks to @carla_gannis for this “music that makes you dumb,” a list of schools, followed by their corresponding SAT scores and favorite bands, from Beethoven to Lil Wayne. [musicthatmakesyoudumb]
In resources: Here’s how to identify seats with power outlets on your flight. [SeatGuru]
Felix Salmon on the tragedy of Cooper Union. As he tells it, President Jamshed Bharucha is more concerned with global brand-building than he is Peter Cooper’s vision. It hurts to read this story. [Felix Salmon]
Public disgust and protests by the Hopi people did nothing to stop Paris’ Druout auction house from making record-breaking sales on sacred Hopi objects and artifacts. It’s one of three such recent auctions in Paris. [TAN]
AFC’s hood gets a new gallery, The Bishop, thanks to two Pratt grad students. [DNAInfo]