Based on many of the big museums in the United States — the ones with the kind of expansive intercontinental collections that span “more than two million works of art” across “five thousand years of world culture” from prehistory to Damien Hirst — the all-purpose art museum location of choice seems to be a park. Why?
Category: Art
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Sometimes I get emotional over fonts …
If “Flickr Is the New Museum” (2008) what happens to the way we interpret art? Understand art? Live with art? We have the right and the capability to put little JPGs together that seem to make sense to us for whatever reason.
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Obsessions: de Young, San Francisco, Photo Composites
Half the time I spend dumbfounded and in love with it has me asking myself whether or not it’s real, but San Francisco is still the easiest city in the world to have a crush on.
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Local Story, Int’l Film Hustler & Global Finance: Festival Circuitry
Is contemporary art becoming like art house cinema and its web of global funders and interests? Any healthy art machine requires a good circulatory system. It’s all well and good to make a work of art, but just as important is the machinery that connects the work of art to its intended or unintended audience — and, by extension, a marketplace.
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Words and Pictures: A Controversy
Molly Norris has been told by the FBI that she needs to change her name and go into hiding because of a cartoon she drew making fun of Comedy Central for censoring South Park. I don’t know what to do about it, but I’m not going to respond by making a cartoon ridiculing Muslims. Maybe I’ll ridicule terrorists and their sponsors, but they just don’t listen to me. Back in May, Hrag wrote about Molly Norris and the stir it caused. I see I clicked Like, and its a good article, but I remember being bothered by Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, and not wanting to participate in it.
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Industrial Anxiety: Amanda Hughen, Roger Hiorns
Amanda Hughen and Roger Hiorns are two artists who look to the relationship between industrial and anxiety production as source material for their artistic practice. Hughen and Hiorns also serve as a study in contrasts, approaching the problem from different coasts, with different concepts, and in different traditions.
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Aiko’s “Blog Post of an Exhibition” in Shanghai
Aiko’s recent exhibition at Andrew James Fine Art in Shanghai was actually made entirely in that Chinese city while she participated in the gallery’s residency program. This locality lends the work a different significance, a home-grown quality that’s reflected in the mix-in of Shanghai street signs and graphic elements. What we see is not so much a heroic, tragic artist struggling to produce a masterpiece, but a practicing artist reflecting the time and the place she occupies.
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“Concerned New Yorkers” Hatch Poster Project for Park51
It’s impossible to escape the heated rhetoric around Park51 in lower Manhattan. And now Adam Wissing, Kenny Komer, and Boris Rasin, who have been making a name for themselves for their clever and in-your-face street interventions, have joined the very public fray with a poster campaign that invites people on the street to voice their opinions in writing. We caught up with them to ask about their latest project.
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Naturalizing the Cityscape, The Photos of David Burdeny
There’s something incredibly dark and disconcerting about descending from the sky towards the Chicago landscape. Maybe it’s the logic of it, or the orderliness. The clean gleaming oval of Lake Michigan. A boat or two, bobbing far from shore, the rest of them moored or clinging to that fault line between solid land and fresh water responsible for so much of Chicago’s recreation, real estate, and remarkableness. Feet from the lake, the skyscrapers push their way to where they scrape, puncturing the interminable flatness as sharp as a shock-induced peak on an EKG.
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Graffiti Laws Make No Sense: NYPD Arrests Watercolor Artist for Painting Outdoors
As part of her practice, Brooklyn artist Julie Torres temporarily tapes large sheets of paper to construction walls or other outdoor areas to paint large watercolors. On the afternoon of July 17, three intimidating plainclothes officers approached her at the corner of N11th and Bedford, arrested her, handcuffed her, fingerprinted her, and placed her in a holding cell for 23 hours. This is her story.
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Wild Things Got Nothin’ on Matta (or Martin Renteria)
Cambridge, MA — I set out from my couch of the moment for some coffee since I am one of those murmuring morning people, the kind who requires a habit and a burnt tongue to prove to myself that I am, in fact, awake. On the short walk down the cramped sidestreets of residential Cambridge, I come face to face with the broad glass windows of Meme Gallery — a storefront space with yellow strings like spokes suspending a purple totemic figure above a basin of water, placed in the middle of the gallery floor. Fabric contortions billowed and oozed along the walls, nightmares leaking through dawn and ceiling tiles, down the gallery walls. Am I awake? What the hell is this?
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Hyperallergic T-shirt Contest, Enter & Win
Today, we announce the Hyperallergic T-shirt Contest. Everyone is encouraged to apply and the winner will receive $250, bragging rights, & their design printed on 500 limited edition t-shirts. All entries must be received Friday, October 15 at 5pm EST.