- Last week, a UNESCO report revealed that climate change could threaten some of our most well-known tourist and art historical destinations from Stonehenge and Easter Island to the ever-sinking Venice. Closer to home, the Statue of Liberty could also see significant damage, which has been foreshadowed by numerous Hollywood disaster flicks. [Gothamist]
- After a long weekend, wearing pajamas 24/7 seems like a pretty smart — and comfy — concept. Artist and, as the Observer ‘s Alanna Martinez describes, “OG of not giving a fuck” Julian Schnabel has been sporting his pj’s for years as this chronology of Schnabel’s questionable fashion choices shows. [New York Observer]
- What are some of the ways developers are making space for artists in Manhattan? 601 Studios, on West 149th Street, converted the basement and storage spaces of Sugar Hill Capital Partners’s prewar building into seven artist studios where one of the tenants includes Fab 5 Freddy. Then there’s 50 West Street, a Battery condo tower nearing completion that houses four artist studios in a nearby construction site, with the caveat that they provide art that will hang in the lobby. [New York Times]
- Could that nouveau Meatpacking restaurant where you’re sipping overpriced cocktails be the former home of a sex club called the Toilet? Get to know the geographical history of former sites of sleaze via Michael Musto. [Paper Magazine]
- AFC contributor RM Vaughan weighs in on the increasing pay gap between artists and arts administrators. A must-read, especially for gem observations such as this: “this is not about salary-shaming. However, when you make the product (the art) but the people who make so many decisions (the administrators) about the product’s fate live in another world, the artist and arts administrator ‘partnership’ looks, from the bottom up, more like a perfect case of exploitation.” [CBC Arts]
- “Vagina Artist” Megumi Igarashi, otherwise known as Rokudenashiko or “Good-For-Nothing-Girl,” has published a manga memoir. Recently translated into English, What is Obscenity? The Story of a Good-For-Nothing Artist and her Pussy documents her controversial plaster molds of her vagina and the obscenity backlash against her art. [Hyperallergic]
- Martin Bailey checks in on the rivalry between two competing Bosch retrospectives — the Noordbranbants Museum and the Museo Nacional del Prado — and it appears as if the Dutch scholars are throwing shade at the Madrid institution’s higher number of works due to disputing attributions. [Art Newspaper]
- Klaus Biesenbach is drumming up excitement for this summer’s Rockaway! with a series of Instagram posts. While the public arts festival will feature Patti Smith and Janet Cardiff, the most exciting, according to Biesenbach’s Instagram, looks to be Berlin artist Katharina Grosse who will transform an abandoned beach house into a brightly colored, spray-paint-covered installation. [The Creator’s Project]
- “I think the art world is amazing that you get to do this really really regular racist shit and say: this is art!” Eunsong Kim gives a much-needed critique of Nikki S. Lee’s “Projects”, the late 90s/early 00s durational performance series where the Korean artist “transforms” into a member of a different ethnic, queer or cultural community. You know where this goes: blackface! Brownface! Insert weary face emoji. [contemporary]
- Former AFC contributor and current Yale MFA student Matthew Leifheit’s black-and-white outtakes from the Yale Daily News appear like Ivy League, Skull and Bones fantasies. Compiling his outtakes into his own version of a newspaper, Leifheit admits to i-D Magazine, “sometimes the most interesting pictures are not best for the story.” [i-D Magazine]
