A hiker who has been painting portraits on cliffs, rocks, and slopes at national parks in the western United States and posting images of the acrylic compositions on social media is now the subject of a National Park Service (NPS) investigation.
Author Archives: Benjamin Sutton
Benjamin Sutton is an art critic, journalist, and curator who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. His articles on public art, artist documentaries, the tedium of art fairs, James Franco's obsession with Cindy Sherman, and other divisive issues have also appeared in The L Magazine, Modern Painters, Art+Auction, artnet News, BKLYNR, and Brooklyn Magazine. He has curated exhibitions at the Lower East Side Printshop, Field Projects, the Spring Break Art Show, and the Gowanus Loft. He is on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.
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Breaking Down ArtReview’s 2014 Power 100 List
ArtReview has released its annual list of the 100 most powerful people in the contemporary art world and, once again, the only surprising thing about the list is how utterly unsurprising it is.
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A Young Artist Debuts at Gagosian, Thanks to Richard Prince
Richard Prince unwittingly gave an emerging conceptual artist his Gagosian debut. The appropriation artist’s current Gagosian exhibition New Portraits — which Hyperallergic’s Tiernan Morgan dismissed as “an amusing exercise, but it doesn’t translate as great art” — features an Instagram photo from Sean Fader’s social media art piece “#wishingpelt.”
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An English Shire Arrives in Bushwick for Exchange Rates
Don’t be intimidated by Blackwater Polytechnic’s ominous name. The British artist collective and alternative art school has a very benevolent goal: To nurture and promote the work of artists and artisans based in Essex. To that end, the group will be showcasing members’ works at Brooklyn’s Theodore Art, along with Seattle’s Season gallery, as part of this week’s Exchange Rates expo in Bushwick.
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Art High School Censors Student Paintings for “the Protection of Children”
Two art students in their final year at the John Curtin College of the Arts in Perth, Western Australia, got an unexpected lesson in institutional politics after their paintings were censored in a student exhibition.
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What Can We Learn from Artists’ and Curators’ Desks?
There is something fascinating about seeing the spaces in which creative people work. Not only for the simple interior-decoration voyeurism it affords, but also for the ways their desks, easels, drawing boards, dark rooms, workshops, and so on reflect the ways their minds function.
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French President Pledges Support for Paul McCarthy’s Butt Plug
France’s chief of state has pledged his support for the American artist Paul McCarthy, after the artist’s 80-foot-tall inflatable sculpture “Tree,” which bares an uncanny resemblance to a butt plug, proved intolerable to prudish Parisians.
Posted inNews
The Many Uses of Rhizome’s New Social Media Preservation Tool
How do you capture and preserve the experience of a new media artwork created on Twitter in 2010? How do you re-create the design and feel of Twitter’s interface at that time, and populate that interface with users’ contemporaneous profile photos?
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All Systems Go at Gowanus Open Studios 2014
Over the weekend, more than 300 artists opened up their work spaces to the public for the 18th annual Gowanus Open Studios.
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Susan Sollins, Pioneering Curator and Art Documentarian, Dies
Susan Sollins, the co-founder of Independent Curators International (ICI) and founder and executive director of ART21 — the non-profit organization that produces the artist documentary series art21 — died on October 13 of unknown causes.
Posted inNews
Graffiti Crackdown Snares Sanctioned Street Art
The city of Detroit launched a secret new graffiti crackdown in the most antagonizing manner imaginable last week: by issuing thousands of dollars in fines to owners of businesses who had commissioned or given permission to artists to create murals on their buildings.