Facebook is building an extension of its campus in Silicon Valley, and, in a signal that it it is a Company to Be Taken Seriously, it has tapped renowned architect Frank Gehry to design the new building.
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Protests Against Stop and Frisk Infiltrate a NY Design Icon
Milton Glaser’s “I Love New York” logo is one of, if not the most, classic symbols of the city; tourists can find it emblazoned on T-shirts sold at street vendors all around town. But visitors passing through these days might see a version of the I Love New York T-shirt that they weren’t quite expecting, and which they may not even fully understand: “I Stop and Frisk New York.”
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Study Finds Google Hits Correspond With Art Sales
A researcher at Washington State University has used Google hits as an indicator of an artist’s fame in a study measuring the factors that influence sales at auction.
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Artist Brings “Sleeping Beauty” to Life
If you thought Spain’s Eskimo Jesus was the only controversial art story happening these days, think again: artist Taras Polataiko has taken it upon himself to realize the fairy tale classic Sleeping Beauty at the National Art Museum of Ukraine. The gist of the performance is: Polataiko dresses “beauties” who have volunteered for the part in white gowns and makeup. They lie sleeping on a bed in the museum for two hours each day. Anyone who visits the exhibition may kiss a beauty, and if she opens her eyes while being kissed, the two must marry each other.
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Tourists Line Up to Visit Beast Jesus
Not only does the internet love Cecilia Gimenez and her Beast Jesus restoration job — so do real life, flesh-and-blood people! Apparently hundreds of tourists have begun making pilgrimages to see the work and take pictures with it, after the apparently well-intentioned octogenarian Eskimo-fied Elías García Martínez’s 19th-century fresco of Jesus. The painting sits on a column between two altars in the Iglesia del Santuario de Misericordia church in Borja, Spain, a small town with a population of around 5,000. Who said the internet was only good for weak ties?
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Octogenarian Restorer Says the Priest Knew What She Was Doing
The caper of the octogenarian restorer continues! And it keeps getting better and better … we’ll call this episode: The Priest Knew!
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Why Doesn’t the UK Want Charles Saatchi’s Art Collection?
Well, here’s a conundrum you don’t face everyday: famed art collector Charles Saatchi wants to donate his collection of contemporary work to his home country, the UK, but they don’t seem to want it. (First-world problems!)
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Some Italian Americans Call Columbus Project “Disrespectful”
Some of us are really excited about the Public Art Fund’s upcoming project Discovering Columbus, for which Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi will construct a living room around the statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle. A living room six stories above the street, mind you, bringing visitors nose-to-nose with the Italian explorer himself (or at least, his likeness). But some Italian-Americans are less than thrilled about it; in fact, they’re pissed.
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Picasso the Playwright
Picasso is renowned and celebrated for his paintings, prints, sculptures, ceramics and even stage designs. But it turns out that Picasso also wrote — two plays and hundreds of poems, to be exact, mostly during the 1940s and ’50s.
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New App Lets You Un-Instagram (aka “Normalize”) Your Photos
A year ago, Fast Company checked in on Instagram, the immensely popular photo-sharing app, nine months after its launch and called its growth “staggering.” That was before Facebook acquired it, this past April, and then, in May, Instagram hit the 50 million users mark. The lesson here? People really love taking and sharing pictures. And they also love filtering them.
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Mitt Romney Says He Would Ax Arts Funding If Elected
Politico has excerpts from an upcoming Mitt Romney interview in Fortune magazine, in which the Republican presidential candidate expounds on his plan to shrink the federal government and reduce spending. Depressingly, but not surprisingly, he targets arts funding.
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Pussy Riot Is Sentenced to 2 Years in Prison for “Hooliganism”
The trial of feminist punk group Pussy Riot has attracted global attention and has exposed Russia’s hardline against freedom of expression and dissent. Today, the trio of band members have been found guilty by a Moscow court of “hooliganism” and that they had “crudely undermined social order.”
