If you happened to be hiding under a social media rock for the past few days, you might have missed the Guggenheim museum’s short-lived multimedia/indie band/internets extravaganza that was their Youtube-sponsored “Play” biennial. The biennial was in reality a juried exhibition that anyone could submit a video to, the only requirements being that the video had to be made in the past two years and come in under the 10 minute mark. More spectacle than art experience, commentators seem generally down on the show.
Opinion
Posted inOpinion
Best Comments of the Week, October 22
Every week, we’ll recap the best comments we’ve received on Hyperallergic’s posts, whether that’s on the blogazine itself, on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook. Be sure to check in every Friday for new comments.
This week, check out responses to our Powerless 20, additions to our list of dangerous works of art, and commentary on the conflict between installation artists and the environment.
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Frieze Art Fair 2010 Heats Up Online
Out across the pond, there’s an art fair going on. Only slightly overshadowed by the Ai Weiwei Turbine Hall installation debacle, London’s Frieze Art Fair has been soldiering on nonetheless to bring collectors to the art, and vice versa. We’ve combed over the internet to bring you some impressions of the fair, the quality of the work on display, and the possibility of a newly invigorated market. Optimism still hasn’t frozen over!
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8 Deadly Works of Art
After Ai Weiwei’s Tate exhibition was effectively quarantined for its impact on visitors’ health and well-being, we thought we’d investigate the art world for a few other pieces and exhibitions that ended up being a little more than curators and artists bargained for. From the Tate Modern’s numerous Turbine Hall offenses to falling sculptures, environmental devastation, and out of control Richard Serras, here are a few works we’d only want to admire from a safe distance.
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Trending: #Hashtag Event Names
Pitchfork, the inveterate hipster music site, recently announced plans for a music festival in New York City named #offline. Social media is great and all, but the sudden popularity of names that begin with the Twitter hashtag-indicating # are starting to be mildly annoying, however niche it is. Just remember it started in the art world! (Alright, maybe tech was first)
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ArtReview’s 2010 Power 100 in Graphs
ArtReview released its annual Power 100 yesterday, a document that makes a spirited attempt at putting the art world into numbers.
The list held a few surprises, but really, what was most un-surprising about the whole affair was how lame and mainstream it was while frontin’ a snarky facade, insider-style. Because really, no one in the art world knew that Gogo had a lot of pull … right?
Here are a few graphs that try to clarify the bullshit and get at what the Power 100 really means.
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The Idiot’s Guide to Typefaces … and Fonts
This chart may be all you need to decide what font, I mean typeface, to use for a current or upcoming project.
Design historian Steven Heller reminded me a few weeks ago that I use the terms font and typeface interchangeably, point taken (even though my mom was a graphic designer and I should know better), but I have to admit to not being so concerned with the usage since I usually get blank stares when I use typeface with non-design people. Did desktop publishing ruin design terminology? Is the term typeface destined to be labeled arcane in the dictionaries of the near future? My guess is yes.
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How is MoMA’s “Abstract Expressionist New York” Faring Online?
The Museum of Modern Art’s Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture, an ambitious exhibition that (kinda) rethinks the standard narrative of Abstract Expressionism (aka AbEx), has been open since October 3. The show complicates things by reintroducing us to artists not entirely within the AbEx canon, putting old favorites in a new context and shining a spotlight on the people and places of AbEx.
The question is: did MoMA and its curators accomplish their goal? We turn to the internet at large for a look at how people have reacted to the exhibition!
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Designers Talk Desks as Creative Spaces
This video from Imaginary Forces is a short film directed by Mark Gardner that interviews various creative types on the idea of a “desk.” Not just the plain old place you throw down your laptop and toil, but the concept of what a desk really is. Is a desk just the place where you work, or can a desk be an entire creative vision, a space in which new ideas are formed and the world changed? Being desk people ourselves, we at Hyperallergic are particularly fascinated by the possibilities of a workspace and what creativity it can foster. The designers, architects and creatives interviewed for the video speak of the physical desk as well as their mental state when working, the separation between a “home desk” and a “work desk.”
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Chinese Artist Bleeds For Democracy [NSFW]
Chinese blogger Mélanie Wang has a report — with graphic photos — of an October 10th performance by artist He Yunchang (Ah Chang) where he executed his new work “One Meter Democracy” at Cao Chang Di in Beijing.
Wang describes the performance and its premise: “At the beginning, he presented his proposal … he would cut a wound on the right side of his body all the way from the clavicle down to below his knee; a wound one-meter long and 0.5-1cm deep. The whole process would be executed under the assistance of a medical doctor, yet without anesthesia.”
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“Duke Fuck List” vs. Tracey Emin
When a female Duke student’s “fuck list” went viral, the entire online world was exposed to her in-depth list of male conquests, a powerpoint presentation of sex that was less sexy than academic. Framed as “thesis research,” the document is so detailed that it actually reads more like research than fun at points.
As a symptom of our always-online generation and the culture of omnipresent social media, the list is another example of oversharing, aptly summed up by Urbandictionary.com as “providing more personal information than is absolutely necessary. Typically done when two or more people are conversing and details of one’s sexual life creep into the discussion.” This immediately sounded familiar. A certain Young British Artist came to mind.
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Banksy Spray Paints on Cartoon Walls
Establishment iconoclast Banksy just took his next step into the mainstream. The street artist, known for his pranks that stretch from painted urban walls to film, has directed the opening sequence for The Simpsons television show.
The animation is an interesting vehicle for Banksy given its massive reach, the TV equivalent of a well-placed wall tag; it’ll reach millions of viewers for sure. The question is, what can viewers take away from Banksy’s latest work?
