The Tod Williams and Billie Tsien-designed building isn’t all that the American Folk Art Museum is losing as it retreats from its large home in midtown and cedes it to the Museum of Modern Art. It also has to give up over 200 works that were promised to it by collector and museum chairman Ralph Esmerian, who is currently serving a six-year prison sentence for fraud, reports The Art Newspaper.
Kyle Chayka
Kyle Chayka was senior editor at Hyperallergic. He is a cultural critic based in Brooklyn and has contributed to publications including ARTINFO, ARTnews, Modern Painters, LA Weekly, Kill Screen, Creators Project, and others.
Posted inArt
The Almost Anonymous of the Digital Art World
Remove Justin Bieber from your internet. Slice up subway posters for easy remixing. Mix LEGO, K’nex, and Lincoln Logs in an incestuous scramble of childhood toys. Star in your own guerrilla TED talk. Those are just a brief excerpt of the mischievous things an active viewer can accomplish at Eyebeam’s retrospective of the hacker-internet artist-new media graffiti collective F.A.T. Lab.
Posted inArt
The Web Killed the Music Video Star
For a while there, it looked like the internet killed music videos, or at least their traditional channels. But the new technologies and social qualities of the web have also given rise to a new generation of interactive music videos.
Posted inOpinion
Get the Daily Weather Forecast in Emoji
We live in a data-driven world. Computer-driven algorithms sense and predict what the future might be like instants before it happens. Google Earth uses satellites to quantify the entire earth. Weather is pretty complicated, too. Dark Sky is a short-term weather predictor that uses real-time data to show a complex view of our current environment, visualized with radar animations. But what about a forecast anyone can instantly understand?
Posted inOpinion
Sesame Street Explains Sculpture
It takes a lot of work to carve a sculpture, but apparently muppets have all the strength it takes. On the April 18 episode of Sesame Street, “sculpture” was the word of the day and the little red fuzzball Elmo teamed up with chiseled Mad Men star Jon Hamm to give viewers a quick history of the medium, from Rodin to David Smith.
Posted inArt
After Sandy, Eyebeam Is Thriving
In late October 2012, three feet of water crashed through Eyebeam, a technology and new media non-profit located in a vast warehouse space on 26th Street in Chelsea. The ground floor location proved catastrophic as the flood poured over from the Hudson: Eyebeam sustained damage to just about every part of its operation, from studio space and galleries to the institution’s all-important archive, stored on vulnerable media formats like hard drives and storage cassettes.
Posted inOpinion
No, Accepting Art Donations for Marijuana Is Not Legal
In a surprising new business model for art galleries, a space named 530 Gallery on Santa Fe Boulevard in Denver, Colorado, was caught offering free marijuana to anyone who donated to the gallery, reports CBS.
Posted inArt
Beam Me Up, Marco
The second floor of the Room Mate Grace Hotel last Wednesday night was humid. A crush of guests lined up around the hotel’s small pool and perched on bleachers staring down on it, hypnotized not just by the summer atmosphere but by the surface of the water. The pool didn’t look so much like a pool as a floating vat of primordial mist. Dancing on the upper layer of mist, circles of light bubbled up like so many blown smoke rings. The surreal vision was an artwork, called “Materialization/De-Materialization,” installed by Marco Brambilla for After Hours, a monthly series of events hosted by Clocktower gallery and Times Square Arts of which Hyperallergic is the exclusive media sponsor.
Posted inOpinion
Turn Your Vines into Flipbooks
Flipbooks have been around since 1868 when they were invented as “kineographs” by John Barnes Linnett. They used to fascinate crowds as the pioneer of moving image media before they were eclipsed by, you know, film projectors. So you totally need a new way to make flipbooks now, right?
Posted inOpinion
Color-Changing Furniture Controlled by Electrical Pulses
Part of choosing to buy an aesthetic object, whether that’s a piece of art, a decorative sculpture, or a provocative furniture item, is committing to living with it. Sure, your Zaha Hadid desk looks amazing, but would you really want to do work on it every day? Into that conundrum comes British designer Ron Arad whose new series “No Bad Colors” is a series of pieces that can change in response to any environment.
Posted inOpinion
Actors Restage Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” in Mall
A thief in a garish feathered hat runs out of a shopping mall store with a leather bag clutched in his hand. He jumps down the stairs and tries desperately to escape as ropes descend down the mall’s atrium. Guards emerge to catch the criminal — but they’re on horseback, dressed in brimmed caps, and decked out with ruffled collars. A regiment of guards on foot marches toward the thief with halberds outstretched. After they catch the would-be escapee, a frame falls from the ceiling of the mall and brackets a view of proud policemen: This is Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch.”
Posted inOpinion
Which Artist Did It Better?
Sometimes it’s not so much about who did something first, but who did it best. In the technology start-up world, it doesn’t matter that dozens of other companies were creating video upload sites before YouTube; YouTube just hit the right combination of community, buzz, and content. Art history is the same. Enduring fame, of the centuries-long variety, doesn’t come to the artist who first followed through on an idea, but to the one who did it the most prominently.