What’s worse than the “starving artist” concept …
February 2014
A’ Design Awards & Competition: Call For Entries, Deadline Feb 28
The A’ Design Awards are a premier annual juried design competition that honors the best designers, architects, engineers, design studios, and design-oriented companies worldwide to provide them with publicity, fame, and recognition.
President Obama Pens Personal Apology to an Art Historian
Professor Ann Collins Johns at the University of Texas at Austin was just as peeved as many people were about President Barack Obama’s knock on art history majors. So she did what any self-assured art historian would do and wrote a letter to Obama on January 31, shortly after the President’s remarks, and sent it using the White House site.
Real or Not? New York Hotel Flaunts Contested Keith Haring Painting
High up among the stars, red and green dancers wriggle. They squiggle across the upturned belly of a writhing, orange snake, itself carried aloft by two bold stick figures. It’s obviously a Keith Haring work. Or at least it looks like one. But in case you had questions, a golden plaque beside it announces, “Called Fake By The Haring Foundation Without Even Examining the Painting.”
Two Illustrators Tackle the Stories of New York City and San Francisco
Hello, New York: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Five Boroughs and Meanwhile in San Francisco: A City in its Own Words — each being published in March by Chronicle Books — are like compilations of memory from living in a city.
Artist Smashes Ai Weiwei Vase to Protest Museum’s Snub of Local Artists
Miami-based artist Maximo Caminero, 51, hurled himself into the media spotlight when he dropped a vase that was part of Ai Weiwei’s According to What? retrospective currently at the Perez Art Museum Miami.
Legendary Iranian Diva Challenges Taboos with Lesbian Couple
The name Googoosh is pop cultural catnip to people across Western and Central Asia, and her latest video “بهشت” (Behesht or Heaven), which was released on Valentine’s Day, may be the first explicit reference to lesbianism in mainstream Iranian pop culture.
Art’s Post-Media Malaise
PARIS — The post-media suggestion itself has been the subject of deliberation for around two decades now. This audacious anthology cleverly brings some of these historical texts together, along with newly commissioned ones, to explore the shifting ideas and speculative practices associated with the idea of post-media.
What’s Your Selfie Pleasure?
LOS ANGELES — This week, a new selfie trend pissed people off. Jason Feiffer, the same guy who dug around on Instagram and discovered funeral selfies, discovered the creepy “selfies with homeless people” trend.
Models of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Utopia Show the Architect as City Planner
Frank Lloyd Wright believed dense urban cities would never make it into the next century. He wrote that “the citizen of the near future preferring horizontality — the gift of his motorcar, and telephonic or telegraphic inventions — will turn and reject verticality as the body of any American city.”
Required Reading
This week, Jasper Johns speaks about his new series, Gehry critique, world press freedoms, what makes a good photo, origin of the word fuck, scientists make nuclear fusion, and more.