Books
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Reading Ian Berry’s Fred Tomaselli

by Kyle Chayka

The Brooklyn Museum’s catalog for their Fred Tomaselli exhibition is pretty mammoth for a show that only takes up three galleries. Still, the tome serves well as a way to expand on ideas presented in the exhibition and give a greater view of the artist’s work than would otherwise be possible in the limited space. Just do yourself a favor and don’t stop at the book version.

The diversity of works included in the catalog, from early installations and sculptures to constellation drug charts and later lacquered collages, is fascinating to see, but the ability to see so much at once also comes at a cost.

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Reading Poster Boy’s The War of Art

by Kyle Chayka

You might remember Poster Boy from his days wreaking havoc on the New York City (Brooklyn) subways, slicing up vinyl-adhesive posters with a pocketed razor and remixing them at will. The prankster switched up celebrity bodies, rearranged words, got big in the blogosphere, profiled in New York Magazine, got questionably arrested, and has now put out a book of his works. It remains a mystery to most people who Poster Boy is, though the smart guess would be a collective of like-minded street artists, and the War of Art book doesn’t do anything to clear the mystery up. What the slim volume does do well is to document Poster Boy’s work, a collection previously only visible on Flickr.

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Reading Lawrence Weschler on David Hockney

by Kyle Chayka

OUR FIRST WEDNESDAY BOOK REVIEW!

Reading Lawrence Weschler’s nigh-legendary book on Robert Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, inspired me to next grab the New Yorker writer’s other artist-focused book, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations With David Hockney. As entertaining as they are challenging, the two books are hard to categorize as biographies, though they concern individuals and their oeuvres. Weschler’s works are more like conversations: anecdotal histories formed less by research than by hanging out with an artist, watching exhibitions open and major works develop, witnessing a lifelong artistic practice.

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One Bag, One Month, Two Books: Michael Cunningham on Art World Angst & Learning from Las Vegas in Vegas

by Ian Epstein

With a month on a plane, I had boredom on the brain and packed what books I could to feed it. The worst decision I have made to date was to bring Michael Cunningham’s latest novel By Nightfall with me and read it over the first few days of jetting … because the book’s protagonist, Peter Harris, is an art dealer suffering from a crippling bout of nihilism and, when you’re setting out from New York City to look for what’s happening elsewhere in the art world, the least helpful thing to bring along is a book busy interrogating everything that underpins the creation, enjoyment, and dissemination of contemporary art. But I read on, attentive to detail in a fit of masochistic idiocy, and because I had room in my backpack for two books and the other one I brought was Learning from Las Vegas, which I wanted to save, of course, for Las Vegas.

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A Review of Designing Obama: The Book

Avatar photo by Hrag Vartanian

By now, we all know that the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign was a great leap forward for the aesthetics of US election campaign, so it should come as no surprise that the director of the Obama campaign, Scott Thomas, decided to publish a book about the innovative Obama design brand and its impact on American pop and design cultures. The resulting book, titled Designing Obama: A Chronicle of Art & Design from the 2008 Presidential Campaign, is an attractive product that includes a short foreward by Pentagram partner Michael Bierut and an introduction by graphic design guru Steven Heller, who cleverly calls the brand “O Design.”

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Review of Street Art New York, by Rojo and Harrington

by Nick Riggle

Imagine a gallerist bringing new art works into the gallery. She pulls her truck up to the gallery curbside, gets out, and starts taking some paintings out of the truck bed. She takes one out just as she realizes that she hasn’t unlocked the gallery doors. So, she places the artwork on the curb and sets off to unlock the gallery. This person has intentionally placed art in the street. Is it street art? Obviously not. So what makes something street art if not the art’s being intentionally placed in the street? It might even seem that street art needn’t be literally in the street at all, so long as one accepts that Blu’s MUTO and similar works are street art — as a digital video it has no literal or direct connection to the street. Street artistic status must hinge on something else. So what is it?

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Reading Martha Cooper’s Tag Town & Going Postal

Avatar photo by Hrag Vartanian

In the world of graffiti, Martha Cooper is a cult figure. She’s an old skool photog who, along with Henry Chalfant, documented the fast-changing world of New York graffiti and unintentionally helped make it sexy and digestible for public consumption. Her book Subway Art, co-authored with Chalfant, kickstarted the graff book genre that has ballooned (for better or worse) into a full-blown field that witnesses hundreds of books published a year.

Since the influence and impact of Subway Art is well-know, I chose to focus this review on two more recent works by the graff photography veteran which were published in that last few years, Tag Town: The Evolution of New York Graffiti Writing and Going Postal.

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Flipping through MOMO’s “3am-6am”

Avatar photo by Hrag Vartanian

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.

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DIWhy? A Review of New Asshole, Issue 1.2

by Artie Vierkant

The second issue of Manya Scheps’ quarterly critical journal New Asshole launched on the internet recently in .pdf format. The journal, a self-described “DIY critique of DIY,” focuses primarily on goings on among the collective and community-based art scenes in Philadelphia. (Full disclosure–this is a scene I only recently left to pursue a graduate degree, and an article of mine was published in the first issue. It was a piece of writing that the editor copy & pasted off of my blog without my prior knowledge.)

New Asshole succeeds, however, in not limiting its scope to the politics of the art scene and extends its grasp to act as a sounding board for critical inquiry within the community. Put simply, it exists to call artists and collectives to task, creating a forum where “DIY,” “hip,” or “rad” art can be discussed critically and held accountable.