Columbia University’s Knox Hall is quiet. Breaking the Fear Barrier, an art exhibit of political cartoons, news photos, documentary footage and children’s drawings to raise awareness about the revolts in Syria, opened its doors two hours ago and scarcely anyone has shown up. The eerie stillness is a harsh reminder of the world’s approach to the situation in Syria: silence and inaction.
Art
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Work of Art Recap: Going Small Town
Simon comes to visit the home of the bonding couch. He sends the artistes on a train ride! They head up to idyllic Cold Springs, New York, where China greets them in a rather fetching trench coat/dress combo. We expect so much from her.
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Yo, Brooklyn Night Bazaar Starts Thurs Dec 15
We’re very excited to be part of the Brooklyn Night Bazaar that starts tomorrow night in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and continues until Saturday (5pm to midnight). The large-scale night market in a 40,000 sq ft warehouse on Kent Avenue, between N5th and N6th Streets, will include over a hundred art, food, craft, merchandise and artisanal vendors of all kinds. The venue will also host concerts in a very trippy interior designed by hot Euro-designers JDS/Julien de Smeldt Architects. And Hyperallergic will be there!
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Cory Arcangel and Pierre Bismuth Tag Team in Soho
When I walked into Team Gallery this week to see their current exhibition, Cory Arcangel vs. Pierre Bismuth my gut reaction was annoyance. The exhibition presents three works by each artist. Though Arcangel’s rise to fame has come somewhat immediately and unexpectedly, as a kind of young hip digital concept artist Pierre Bismuth’s 20-year career is equally concerned with technology and media. The result is seamless and startling to an admittedly backwards curmudgeon like me.
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Following Vito Acconci
I pass Vito Acconci on the way to the subway perhaps two to three times a week at random times. I know his studio is in my neighborhood, but I haven’t figured out his route or his schedule. Not that I’ve made an effort to follow him as that would feel like copying his performance.
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New iPad App Makes Sketching Social
MANILA, Philippines — For years now, artists and designers have had blogs and social media to give the general public access to their studios and lives. But what if you could peek into artists’ very thought processes? What if you could see their sketches evolve day by day, before they’re actualized into stunning installations?
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If Gender Is a Performance, Can’t Artistic Importance Be Too?
Attending transgender singer, songwriter and performance artist Mx Justin Vivian Bond’s exhibition, The Fall of the House of Whimsy at Participant Inc., I left feeling horribly conflicted, so conflicted that it took me a few weeks to even approach the topic in writing. Even though I originally felt irritated by Bond’s self-mythologizing tenancy, I began to later wonder if Bond’s self-creation as an artistic icon is any different from any other art exhibition.
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Trick or Treat in the Manila Slums
MANILA, Philippines — The film opens casually enough. Children wearing Halloween masks float, or roll, backwards. As we pay attention to the surroundings, we realize we are following the children through the poorest conditions, which shoot past us. Over time, we realize we are on railway tracks, and the children are on a cart. People pop in and out of frame, and the kids with Halloween masks continue to stare at us.
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For the Tasteless Millionaire in Your Life
If you have not yet bought a small gift for the tasteless millionaire in your life, I recommend visiting H. Maxwell Fisher’s Underground Toy Emporium & Spaceship Parking at Jim Kempner Fine Art. The “emporium” imagined by Randy Regier is an exhibit of the type of cheap toys in flattened colors from the mid-20th century that projected a robot-infested future in breakable plastic.
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Winter 2012 Interns Apply Now
Hyperallergic is looking for a few good interns for the first quarter (January to April) of 2012. If you think you got what it takes please fill out our form by December 28 and we’ll let you know by January 10.
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3 iPad Apps Recreate the Museum Experience…Almost
MANILA, Philippines — Over the past few months, I’ve watched with envy as stunning museum shows have gone up in my old haunts in Los Angeles and New York. Thankfully, in recent months three museums have released exhibition-related apps for the iPad and iPhone. To see how they stack up, I reviewed three apps (CA Design HD at LACMA, AB EX at MoMA, Cattelan at Guggenheim) in their iPad incarnations. Here are my thoughts.
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I Am Underemployed and Underwhelmed
On Saturday I visited Underemployed at Zurcher Studio on Bleecker Street. I read the press release for the show and got excited. First of all, the show is curated by an artist, Josh Blackwell. The premise of the show hinges on Oscar Wilde. His quote from The Decay of Lying: An Observation gives Blackwell’s exhibition form: “The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.” The art in this exhibition tickled my fancy and my funny bone, but I’m not sure that much of it stood up on its own.
