During a particularly arduous training climb on California’s Mt. Baldy, Los Angeles–based creative director and photographer Michael Gabel had an epiphany about the link between an image and the altitude at which it was taken. “I was set on 6,000 vertical feet in six miles and something clicked about tagging photos with the elevation,” he recently explained to Hyperallergic, adding that this solved a key problem: “As a climber and a hiker I love using topographical maps, and naming your photographs is forced and kind of annoying.”
Continue Reading → 
If David Ogilvy was the “father of advertising,” Andy Warhol, with his prolific manipulation of pop culture’s visual lexicon, was surely its eccentric uncle. The chaotic universe conjured by the pop artist belonged to everyone and no one, an endless masquerade of identifiable forms drawn up from the well of mass-media fueled mass consumption.
Continue Reading → 
CHICAGO — “Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded,” 29-year-old spy Edward Snowden told the Guardian last Sunday, openly identifying himself as the whistleblower on the NSA PRISM program, which he alleged is gathering communications data not just from foreigners, as officials previous said, but on a vast domestic scale. Nine major internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook are all named as offering up data, according to DemocracyNow. We are all being watched, and now we know it.
Continue Reading → 
Lady Gaga has been accused of plagiarizing from many artistic sources: Canadian-Ukranian artist Taras Polataiko, New York performance artist Colette, and Canadian artist Jana Sterbak, to name a few. But now someone’s finally going the extra step and suing her.
Continue Reading → 
Have you ever seen that Naomi Watts film Ellie Parker? In it she plays an Australian actress in Los Angeles, not so different from the real Watts. Much of the film takes place in her car as she shuttles between auditions, intermittently giving herself pep talks, falling apart, and trying to conduct the business of living, despite an obsessive need to make sure she never misses a not-quite-opportunity.
Continue Reading → 
The Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award, a new grant from the College Art Association (CAA), provides funds to emerging authors of monographs on the history of art and related subjects. The purpose of the award is to reduce the financial burden that authors carry when acquiring images for publication, including licensing and reproduction fees for both print and online publications. The fall application deadline is September 15, 2013.
Continue Reading → 
OKLAHOMA CITY — One of the most meditative art museum experiences is out in the middle of the Great Plains, in a place you would likely never think to look.
Continue Reading → 
The NSA surveillance scandal has, in a short term, made a lot of people feel depressed and/or worried about the state of governance in America. This is both good and bad for Jeremy Scahill’s new documentary, Dirty Wars, which is directed by Richard Rowley and is also the title of a simultaneously released book by Scahill. Good because it casts all of the revelations in the movie in a now easily believable light. Bad because most people don’t want to spend their Friday nights falling even deeper into depression, and that’s what the film will do. Currently playing in select theaters across the country, Dirty Wars will wring you of whatever wide-eyed, wholehearted faith you may have had left in President Obama.
Continue Reading → 
To launch a project that will crowdsource digital media projected into space, it makes sense to start with a GIF, the most beloved manifestation of our current internet noise. Today the first GIF to ever be sent into space started a journey to a distant solar system — which it will reach in 2031.
Continue Reading → 
To say it’s been a bad year for secular culture in Egypt is a special kind of understatement, but a string of developments this month — all linked to President Mohamed Morsi’s appointments of several key positions in tourism and culture — have left observers reeling and provoked a series of bold direct actions from dissidents.
Continue Reading → 
