Do you lie awake at night, sweating bullets, crippled by an unshakable insecurity, a sinister hunch crowding your mind, a sour soupçon that perhaps you are not viewing the “right” GIFs on the internet? Fear not.
June 27, 2013
Posted inArt
Color-Branding Politics
Two days ago, Americans watched (many via Twitter) Texas State Senator Wendy Davis filibuster the hell out of a proposed bill that would have banned all abortions in the state after 20 weeks and closed all but five of Texas’s clinics that currently offer the procedure. Davis stood and spoke without any breaks (including to drink, eat, or use the bathroom) for 13 hours, and perhaps because of that heroic effort — or perhaps because of a sexist male reporter with an eye for detail — a lot of attention ended up focused on her shoes. Davis wore pink sneakers for her filibuster, and those sneakers have become a symbol.
Posted inArt
Remembering Iran’s Fight for Democracy in Brooklyn
There was a time, some four years ago, when Iran held the world’s attention. Protests began there in June 2009, after the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in what many claimed was a rigged vote. A graphic video of the death of a young woman named Neda Agha-Soltan, who was shot by a member of the Basij militia, became an international focal point and symbol. But time passed, the protests were violently crushed, Ahmadinejad stayed in power, and then other countries began to erupt with dissent. Most of the world — or at least, the media — moved on.
Posted inArt
This Museum Kills Fascists
OKLAHOMA CITY — Is this land really made for you and me? That was the original tone of doubt at the end of Woody Guthrie’s classic folk anthem “This Land Is Your Land,” and now anyone can see its original lyrics exhibited below a halo of illuminated guitars in the new Woody Guthrie Center.
Posted inArt
A Landmark Modernist House Needs a Home
A small house that once heralded the arrival of Le Corbusier–style architecture in the United States needs a home, but its potential new neighbors aren’t terribly keen on the structure’s stark modernism.
Posted inArt
Disrupt NSA Surveillance With This Typeface
As a reaction to government surveillance, the ZXX typeface is embedded with disruptive designs that are meant to combat optical character recognition processes. The four options for online communications camouflage — called XED, Noise, False, and Camo — each have characteristics that keep them legible to humans, but baffling to machines.
Posted inSponsored
Develop Your Leadership Skills and Understand Global Arts Management Practices
The new International Leadership Program in Visual Arts Management – ILPVAM is an advanced executive certificate program offered by three leading institutions: NYU, Deusto Business School (University of Deusto, Spain), and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
ILPVAM combines advanced business theory and techniques together with the latest concepts and global trends in visual arts management and administration to provide you a rigorous, engaging educational experience.
Posted inArt
AbEx Redux: The Clyfford Still You May Not Know
Best known as the man responsible for the massive Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas: A Catalogue Raisonné, British art historian David Anfam has more recently been focusing on another mid-20th-century American artist, Clyfford Still, whose flame-like works that have their own luminosity. “You can turn the lights out. The paintings will carry their own fire,” he once said.
Posted inOpinion
A Map, Not a Territory: Apple and the End of Skeuomorphism
In an influential special issue of Scientific American appearing in 1991, the computer scientist Mark Weiser wrote of the challenges in integrating computers to “the natural human environment” such that they “vanish into the background.” Though not quite a theory of user interface design, Weiser’s notion of “ubiquitous computing” remains definitive in its vision for computing as a pervasive but unobtrusive element of the human experience.
