This anonymous work — the first we’ve received — is the most digital image, and informed by digital aesthetics, we’ve received. While most mail art lends itself to a handmade and analog quality, here the artist has gone to the other extreme and sent us a digital print on photo paper with no indication of context.
Posted inNews
Chinese Hackers Attack Ai Weiwei Petition
A distributed denial of service attack carried out by Chinese hackers took down Change.org’s petition to free Ai Weiwei yesterday. Led by the Guggenheim museum and support by major international art figures, the petition has been gaining steam with over 90,000 signatures. The site is now back online.
Posted inOpinion
Francis Bacon Describes His Painting Process
In this 1985 documentary on the artist, made while he was still very much alive, Francis Bacon talks through one of his most iconic works and explains how he makes paintings. The artist also slowly gets very drunk and discusses the beauty of the word “voluptuous.”
Posted inArt
Online Art Space Goes Virtual Green
From ASCII sunsets to screen-flattened foliage, Artist Laurel Schwulst makes parks for the internet. In a temporary exhibition called Proposals For Future Parks shown on internet-based art space bubblebyte.org, the artist uses different media approaches, both online and off, to explore the abstract idea of a “park,” a loose term that for the artist might signify a constructed landscape that has been made for humans to experience. In this show of four parts, Schwurst designs parks that are meant to be experienced in the manner we are now most accustomed to — through screens, virtually and at a remove.
Posted inSponsored
[Sponsor] Tyler School of Art Summer Painting and Sculpture Intensive Program
The Tyler School of Art Summer Painting Intensive / Summer Sculpture Intensive (SPI/SSI) is a 7-week (June 13–July 29) immersion program for artists interested in developing their work in a challenging and supportive environment. The SPI / SSI program is a non-credit, post-baccalaureate style residency program suitable for BA and BFA seniors and recent graduates aiming to hone their artistic and intellectual skills, students building a portfolio for application to graduate school and professional artists seeking to strengthen their abilities and expand their outlook.
Posted inNews
Bravo Responds to Gallery Girls Controversy
On April 8, I wrote a story on Bravo’s Gallery Girls, a new reality show in the making, and the name and concept’s similarity to a popular independent webcomic, also called Gallery Girls. In this post, Bravo responds to the possible conflict and I take stock of commenter responses.
Posted inNews
Serrano’s “Piss Christ” Smashed With Hammer (Again)
The Guardian reports that an extremist Christian group has attacked a print of artist Andres Serrano’s infamous photograph “Piss Christ” (1987), smashing an acrylic plastic barrier around the piece and slashing the print itself with a “screwdriver or ice pick” (WTF). This follows previous attacks on the same photograph in 1997 and 2007.
Posted inNews
Egyptian Antiquities Minister Sentenced to Prison, Under Fire for Fashion Faux Pas
The bad news keeps rolling in for Egyptian Antiquities Minister Zahi Hawass, who yesterday was sentenced to one year in prison for his failure to enforce a court ruling. In other news, many Egyptians are outraged that Hawass used ancient Egyptian artifacts to promote his own menswear line.
Posted inArt
Today’s New York Protest for Ai Weiwei [UPDATE]
At 1pm EST today near the Chinese embassy in Manhattan, out by the water at 520 Twelfth Avenue, a congregation of chairs gathered. Art worlders, community members and human rights activists came out in force, to the tune of a few hundred, to protest for the release of Ai Weiwei, the internationally-famed artist who has been detained by the Chinese government for the past two weeks without charge. Click through to check out a photo essay of the protest featuring a diverse group of chairs, Jerry Saltz and protesters young and old (plus a dog concerned for Panda Bears).
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week’s Required Reading has links to the garb needed to paint in the arctic, Jasper Johns and orgies, an interview with artist Sharon Hayes, a handwritten transcript by Diego Rivera, artist Cao Fei on the unsung factory workers of the Pearl River Delta and Japanese shut-ins.
Posted inArt
Everyone Wants to be First
There is apparently something about institutional street art shows that move museum folk towards declarations of their firstness. Street Art at the Tate Modern in 2008 was billed as “the first major public museum display of Street Art in London” while just last winter Hugh Davies, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, glowed that he was “really proud” to be “the first (American) museum to do an international street art show of this scale and scope.”
Art In The Streets, the latest and of course much buzzed exhibition opening at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art is billed by MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch as — surprise surprise — “the first exhibition to position the work … from street culture in the context of contemporary art history.”
Posted inOpinion
Unurth: “Art in the Streets” Is a Missed Opportunity
Sebastian Buck of Unurth, which is arguably the premiere street art photo blog, has a lot of visual goodies from LA MOCA’s Art in the Streets show. He also has some very interesting thoughts on the show, which officially opens tomorrow:
