… a lull in Iraqi violence helps spur cultural activity … homeless artists in Austin, Texas, have an art show & benefit … art mogul Eli Broad is scouting for a museum location … artist Sam Bassett is arrested for trying to make New York’s Sotheby’s building into art.
Hrag Vartanian
Hrag Vartanian is editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic. You can follow him at @hragv.
Posted inNews
Why You Probably Shouldn’t Stash Your Picasso in Your London Flat
While Main Street continues to hemorrhage jobs and Wall Street revives its ridiculous bonus system, the elite among us — most notably the trustees of the New Museum — will probably be very interested to know where they should stash their valuables during these sad times in case, well, in case … which brings me to one of my favorite topics: stolen art.
Posted inNews
Dia Returns to Chelsea, Venice Architecture Biennale Gets 1st Female Head, NYU Launches Taste Project
… Kiev awaits its own art destination-worthy art center … Banksy gets marked up before people have a chance to vote about keeping it or not … the Getty Trust & the Egyptian gov’t is working together to preserve King Tut … a San Francisco muralist gets stabbed on the job … the Obama’s send mixed messages on art … a report from BETA Spaces in Bushwick.
Posted inArt
The 18th C. Food Pornographer at LACMA
Two weeks ago, I found myself in Los Angeles with an afternoon to kill. I ventured to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and stumbled across a small exhibition by 18th C. Spanish still life painter Luis Meléndez. The exhibition, titled “Master of the Spanish Still Life,” was a quaint two-room show decked out with bizarre gray stucco walls treated with a ragging technique that made it look like a display at a suburban home furnishings shop. Faux finishes aside, what immediately struck me as I perused the canvases were two works in particular that I would characterize as Rococo food porn — they were pretty hot.
Posted inNews
US Federal Arts Funding Highest in 16 Yrs, Persian Gulf Culture Boom, NY State of the Arts…
…Jean Nouvel’s new MoMA tower gets chopped and approved…Bushwick politico meets with local arts community…San Francisco galleries are branching out…and starting this week everyone will be looking to the art auctions of New York as a barometer of the art world’s economic health.
Posted inHyperallergic
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Posted inArt
Public Space Can Be Used Against You: NY Street Ad Takeover #2
On Sunday, many New Yorkers were probably trying to figure out who whitewashed and pimped out some of the city’s boring billboards. If you liked what you saw then let me introduce you to the man behind the renegade campaign, known as New York Street Advertising Takeover (NYSAT), his name is Jordan Seiler and he wants to return public space to the people.
Posted inNews
MoMA Reframes the Moderns, Anaylzing Jung’s “Red Book,” Famous Accountants Opens…
…Grand Rapids, Michigan, stunned by success of ArtPrize Festival…Mark Rothko’s first solo show in Moscow to take place this spring…van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam launched “Vincent van Gogh: The Letters” website with complete images and text of all the artist’s correspondence…Ukrainian art website Proza is shut down for kiddie porn, and a Kiev gallery is set on fire after a gay literary anthology presentation.
Posted inArt
iBlanket: “Ads” That Don’t Sell & Encourage Debate
My husband was walking down Bedford Avenue on Wednesday, and he spotted someone pasting up posters on a wall which is almost always dominated by a giant Shepard Fairey poster, so frequently in fact that it might as well be his permanent ad space. It was lunchtime and no one stopped or cared. Knowing my love of street art, and what can sometimes be inane details, he quickly snapped a pic with his camera phone and emailed it to me with the message, “Someone covering up fairey [sic].”
What at first glance appeared to be a run of the mill “sniping” (i.e. illegal posting of corporate advertising), turned out to be a new street art campaign, iBlanket, though the artist prefers the term public art. The brain child of Bushwick artist Ann Oren, iBlanket riffs off the ubiquitous Apple “i” genre and turns our attention to the problems of homelessness just as the temperatures have started to plummet.
Posted inNews
Social Media Collective @Platea to Mark 40th Anniv. of Vito Acconci’s “Following Piece”
The @Platea social media art collective is doing a cover of Vito Acconci’s seminal “Following Piece” (1969), which was first initiated forty years ago this month.
A study in the public spaces we occupy and assumptions around privacy, Acconci followed random people in Manhattan during the month and reported on their activities until they entered a private area such as an apartment or car.
Posted inBooks
Flipping through MOMO’s “3am-6am”
It’s an epidemic in street art publications, picture books with no little or no text and often no photo credits or explanatory text. The democratization of publishing, accompanied by the popularity of street art, has created a mass delusion that just because anyone could that everyone should publish a street art book. It’s far from the case.
MOMO is one of my favorite New York street artists though I tend to dislike his work outside (or is it inside) of that context. Nowadays, his large abstract paper pieces are plastered on construction sites and sidewalk overhangs throughout downtown Manhattan and northern Brooklyn.
Posted inArt
Andy Yoder Shows Us His Man Cave at Winkleman
Quirky, clever and crafty are words that immediately come to mind when describing the work of Andy Yoder. His brand of conceptual sculpture easily manipulates scale, surfaces and materials to create fetishistic objects that are familiar and alienating.
In his latest solo show titled Man Cave at Winkleman in Chelsea, Yoder continues looking at the banal objects of our culture (a garage door, a bowling pin, hub caps, a lifesaver) but transforms them in ways that seem to comment on our societal need to covet material possessions, no matter how ridiculous.