GO-Globe.com’s infographic that shows what happens online in 60 seconds. I wonder how much art is made or posted in that same period? (via Laughing Squid)
This week’s Required Reading has Serra at the Met, pole dancing’s relationship to art, tech’s relationship to whiteness, mud stenciling, sound art, ruminations on the art world by a bigwig at Christie’s and the art of getting high.
Over at the London Review of Books, David Hansen looks at the Richard Serra drawing show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. He characterizes the work as “sublime indifference.”
In the saddest news I could ever imagine, the state of New York has declared that pole dancing is NOT art.
I was over at John Powers’s place for dinner a month ago and we discussed the issue of hi-tech and whiteness. Even though we associate hi-tech devices with the notion of white (thanks to Apple), that wasn’t always the case. The computer screen was often black and/or green in earlier decades. Like any good blogger, Powers took that conversation and created an interesting blog post. Here’s a taste:
At the time whiteness faded from view because high technology had become powerfully linked with command-and-control systems, and those systems were felt to be rigid, threatening, and dehumanizing, not at all cool. Star Wars so thoroughly cast the Modernist NEW as fascist, that films like Blade Runner and Alien didn’t have to show pristine white control rooms — they were implied, the sinister negative space of the dingy dark Used Futures where the real action was taking place during the 80s and early 90s.
Appears that some pro-labor activists in Wisconsin have started to “mud stencil” anti-labor targets.
Swiss artist Zimoun’s sound installations are also visually lovely. Check them out over at BldgBlog.
Over at the Financial Times, an interview with the chief executive of Christie’s International. He explains the art world is “exploding.”
Creator’s Project looks at what they consider the best art hacks — as in hacker — in the last century. While I think many of their examples are a little limited (how about something non-Western?) but I’m glad they included Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book.
And finally, Ken Johnson published a book on the intersection of art and drug culture, which WNYC explored. But we wanted to remind people about a classic piece about marijuana by Carl Sagan. It may not be visual art but it touches on issues of perception.
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links (10 or less) to long-form articles, videos, blog posts or photo essays worth a second look.
