Last week, the “first real inauguration of the [Konbit Shelter] community center with workshops and events brought by Ayiti Resurrect and Ayiti Cherie Healing” took place in Bigones, Haiti. Spearheaded by Brooklyn-based artist Swoon, the Konbit Shelter Project was created with the idea that a group of artists, engineers, architects, and builders could pool their individual knowledge, resources, and time to make a lasting difference in post-earthquake Haiti. [Konbit Shelter blog]
Opinion
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Who Needs Bricks When You’ve Got Pixels?
Production outfit The Third & The Seventh has made a movie that allows us to experience architecture better than ever before, showing iconic buildings in multiple perspectives simultaneously and suffusing them with soft, unearthly light. Viewers would be excused for thinking that these clips were shot on a real camera, but the really amazing part? It’s all three-dimensional computer rendering, created by hand. Incredible.
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Killer Last Meals
Graphic designer James Reynolds recreated the final meals of nine American prisoners executed between 1963 and 2006, then photographed each on an inmate-orange cafeteria tray.
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5 Reasons Egypt Won’t Get Their Central Park Stele Back
Apparently Egypt is starting to get jealous of Greece and wants to repatriate Cleopatra’s Needle, the trophy of cultural dominance granite stele that’s been festooning Central Park since 1881. Too bad 129 years is totally long enough for finders keepers! Here are five reasons Egypt won’t get their stele back. So there.
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Buy Atelier Van Lieshout’s Utrecht Blob House
Call it the anti-condo: Dutch artist and architect Joep van Lieshout’s Atelier van Lieshout is offering up their first house for sale, and this inhabitable work of art is not your average villa. Draped with an intestinal blob-tunnel, Lieshout’s one of a kind Utrecht building is available for a cool one million euros, but it’s not for the faint of heart (or eye).
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Required Reading Debuts
Mary Louise Schumacher on Steve Martin’s art world novel — Carolina Miranda on the “new shape of street art” in ARTnews — “Smithsonian” of Arab art in Qatar — Filip Dujardin’s architectural remixes — Star Wars Modern blogs on art and technology
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I See Balloon Dogs Everywhere, Shhh Don’t Tell Jeff Koons
In response to Jeff Koons’s zany copyright lawsuit, I thought it would be fun to collect some awesome balloon dog-related merchandise and images from across the web.
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Exclusive Look at Julian Schnabel’s New Artist Statement
[SPOOF] [image via Toothpaste For Dinner]
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Starbucks Logo Goes Meh
Global coffee retailer Starbucks is turning 40 this year and they’ve announced a new logo to coincide with the occasion. Looking at the sweep of logos from the original topless two-tailed mermaid — though the company often calls it a siren — that appeared on cups at their first store in Seattle’s Pike Place Market to the more modern version, I can’t help but notice the march towards abstraction and a less coffee-centric brand. Gone is the word “coffee” and the color brown, and in its place is an almost Holiday Inn-like bland greenness that zooms in even closer on the increasingly de-nuded mermaid. What this redesign suggests is that Starbucks will continue to look beyond coffee and go more downmarket as it continues to grow.
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Ben Davis Sez Art Criticism Isn’t Dead, Just Maimed
‘Tis only a flesh wound! Newly-crowned Artinfo deputy editor Ben Davis (née Artnet) posts a rant about the State of Art Criticism, pointing out that even though serious criticism may look dead, it’s actually just become increasingly eclipsed by the more hit-friendly version of art writing he deems “art news.” Davis conflates this new world of web-based art criticism with a drop in quality, but I think serious criticism is actually more relevant now than ever. While we may not have journals full of October-style criticism, we do have an engaged community of artists, curators, reporters and critics who all contribute to a group dialogue that is a composite of so-called art criticism and art news.
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Ambient Poetry
Last October, Luzinterruptus participated in the 2010 Poetas por km2 poetry festival in Madrid with an installation of illuminated poems. They filled the garden with 1,000 white envelopes containing poems written by numerous poets specially for the occasion by the poets who participated in the festival. [Luzinterruptus Blog]
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Is America Ready to Confront Its Artistic Taboos?
Now that the dust has somewhat settled on the Wojnarowicz and Blu censorship cases, a number of people have been chiming in about what this tells us about the state of art and our culture, specifically American culture. The numerous opinions from where I stand look dire. Here are some fascinating posts we haven’t mentioned before.
