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.”
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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.
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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.
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Over the weekend, a group of 100 or so activists protesting Tadashi Kawamata and Christophe Scheidegger’s “Favela Café” were teargassed at Art Basel. The café, in attempting to mimic the desperate conditions of Brazil’s tragic slums, meant to bring introspection and perspective to Art Basel’s air of orgiastic excess — a project not unlike building a waterslide on the sun.
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On the second track of David Byrne’s last album with the Talking Heads, he told the story of Mr. Jones, a pyrotechnic jack-of-all trades, “everybody’s friend,” straddling the creative universe of “rock stars” and the hum-drum of “conventioneers.” But when Byrne took to the stage last week, all wire-rimmed spectacles and club collars, to deliver Columbia’s Visual Arts MFA commencement speech, it wasn’t exactly yesteryear’s “big day for Mr. Jones” for the attending graduates.
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Arlene’s Grocery, the popular Lower East Side bar, gallery space, and concert venue, has taken down a show featuring the work of Robert Preston, arguing that the artist’s work was too “aggressive” and “literal” for their venue. Preston’s pieces, all paintings from his Seven Deadly Sins series, were slated to run at the space through the end of the month, but he found his works censored the day after Monday’s opening and was asked to take them down.
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Rapper/self-awareness wormhole Kanye West gave an interview to Jon Caramanica in yesterday’s New York Times, a dialogue on West’s new album that devolved into the artist detailing his increasingly insane (or polymathic) credentials as a “creative professional.”
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Are you an arts administrator with experience in any of “the arts, entertainment, motion picture, and television industries”? Has strip-mining the world for talent with 501(c)(3) impunity left you with an aching void where once resided a crystalline commitment to truth and beauty? Are you an American, and does your patriot’s sense of charity extend to providing free labor to the misunderstood gentle giant of our federal government, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)? Does the prospect of moving to Washington not provoke in you a physical sense of foreboding?
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Luhring Augustine holds forth, a garrison mirage, on Bushwick’s Knickerbocker Avenue. After several hours of 56 Bogart bohemia, that grey facade, all frosted glass and sleek surveillance, seemed less sinister than inviting, the kind of place a down-to-earth oligarch might pass the time after putting their name down at Roberta’s.
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In a recent announcement, New York City Councilmember Stephen Levin “signed on” to One Percent for Culture, an initiative of the Fund for the City of New York. Reached by phone yesterday afternoon, Councilmember Stephen Levin told Hyperallergic, “The arts are an important part of the fabric of New York City as a whole, and this is especially true in my district … I have a very high percentage of artists who live and work here and the percentage seems to grow every year.”
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