When I recently visited the exhibition CR(I)SES AD(JUST)MENTS (COLLAPSED) at Flux Factory, a solo show by French artist Christine Laquet, I was immediately seduced by a white circular platform featuring red high-heeled shoes and imagery projected onto it from the ceiling. The images fluctuated between close-ups of slow-moving jellyfish and blurry snow scenes, and were accompanied by a captivating audio track. Titled “If by love possessed,” the audio is an interview Laquet did with a “Doctor in Monsterology” — a discussion of what, where, and who could be the contemporary monster, read by a teenage girl.
Daily Archives: June 17, 2013
Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell, or Channeling Baldessari in Bushwick
It was a dark and stormy night. Last Thursday, I mean. In Brooklyn, anyway. A storm that brought the kind of hard, windy rain that makes you want to stay home and drink tea. But I didn’t. I snuck into the back of the exhibition space at 3rd Ward instead, sodden and dripping after jogging four blocks from the bus stop without an umbrella, to catch a panel discussion moderated by curator and gallery director Krista Saunders called “Intro to the NY Art World.”
Unpaid Interns Fight Back
In a big victory for unpaid internship lawsuits, a federal judge ruled last Tuesday that two interns who worked on the movie Black Swan for Fox Searchlight Pictures should have been paid. Federal District Court Judge William H. Pauley III sided with the former interns, Eric Glatt and Alexander Footman, “because they were essentially regular employees,” the New York Times reports. It’s not quite be the nail in the coffin for unpaid internships yet, but it’s progress.
Three Takes on the Art Basel “Rioters”
Over the weekend, a group of 100 or so activists protesting Tadashi Kawamata and Christophe Scheidegger’s “Favela Café” were teargassed at Art Basel. The café, in attempting to mimic the desperate conditions of Brazil’s tragic slums, meant to bring introspection and perspective to Art Basel’s air of orgiastic excess — a project not unlike building a waterslide on the sun.
Critical Play: Picturing Playgrounds in Central Park
The name Robert Moses has become synonymous with the type of city planning most sentient New Yorkers hate. If he’d had his way, the legendary architect of mid-20th-century New York would have replaced Greenwich Village with a 10-lane highway, much like he razed neighborhoods in the South Bronx to build the Cross Bronx Expressway — an act many believe contributed to its decay. But to his credit, when Moses became Long Island State Park Commissioner in 1934, there were only 119 city playgrounds. When he retired in 1960, there were 777, which he hoped would deter juvenile delinquency by offering “clean, wholesome play” to children.
A Curated Debate: Barbara Bloom at the Jewish Museum
How do you get across the meaning of an object that’s separated from everyday life by the glass of a museum vitrine? This question, constantly grappled with by curators of object-based collections, is very much at stake in the Jewish Museum’s current exhibition As it were … So to speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom.
Study: Mice Prefer Kandinsky to Mondrian
A recent study shows that mice can indeed have preferences to paintings, given the proper morphine reinforcement.