We want to take a break from our regularly scheduled posting and keyboard tapping to thank our sponsors!
This month’s sponsors are Christie’s, Pernod Absinthe, Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory museum and The Association of Professional Art Advisors. Click through to learn more.
Some things leave us speechless and this bite of Twitter wisdom is one of them. There are no words for this ridiculousness though it really does put things into perspective.
For information on the history of US arts funding, visit a post I wrote last year for the Art21 blog.
Unbeknown to the vast majority of New Yorkers, a street art project has quietly been taking place under the streets of our fair city, artist by artist and flashlight by flashlight. The Underbelly Project is a reaction against the overwhelming commercialization of street art. Project organizers Workhorse and PAC called the fad for ripping off street objects “commercialism at its worst.” To rectify this supposed “commercial” situation being faced by street artists, Underbelly “safeguards” street art’s “integrity” by placing it where only the select few can get at it: in an abandoned, unused subway stations somewhere underneath the teeming pavement.
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, readers respond to the UK arts funding cuts, Hans Ulrich Obrist’s book reading extravaganzas and apartment exhibition vogue.
In two weeks, #TheSocialGraph will open at Outpost in Bushwick, Brooklyn and we’re incredibly excited. What is #TheSocialGraph? It is an evolving exploration of the burgeoning field of social media art and the relation of contemporary art with this populist tool as a medium, facilitator, and subject for art.
I am the curator of the project and I’ve pulled together a number of interesting artists, writers, social media mavens, and others to share ideas and explore possibilities presented by the intersection of visual art and social media. Some of the art in #TheSocialGraph will be about social media, some will use social media as an integral component of the finished project, and some will be more of an experiment so we’re not exactly sure what to call it.
You may have heard the term “Superflat” tossed around in relation to some paintings reminiscent of Saturday morning cartoons on crack, or maybe a series of drawings that look familiar, but with an extra dash of foreign, outer-space weirdness. You’ve probably heard of “kawaii” culture or maybe even Kaikai-Kiki. And if you haven’t? Fear not, because we’re going to go through all this vocab together to marshal what exactly Superflat is.
The Washington Post, always the voice for the powerful, connected, and well-moneyed, has an article on the victims of art dealer Lawrence Salander. They’ve tracked down Earl Davis, the son of American modern master Stuart Davis, some psychiatrist whose father’s collection was entrusted to the dealer, and a few others.
What the Post “reports” is a tale of blameless victims taken advantage of by the big bad Salander. And trust me, I don’t have any affection for the bigwig dealer turned con man, but there are some questions that the Post doesn’t ask …
Did you know that Jeffrey Deitch is a celebrity? I bet you did. Did you know he lives in a “movie star mansion” in the “trendy L.A. neighborhood of Los Feliz”? I bet you didn’t, and I bet you didn’t care either. “Celebrity has become, for better or worse, an art form,” Deitch says. Well, the LA MoCA director must be a pretty great artist, or the LA Times wouldn’t be publishing his very own episode of Cribs.
We at Hyperallergic know it’s close to Halloween because of all the articles giving us last minute costume ideas! Now, a slutty viking or a faux-Gaga meat dress might be fine if you’re just going to some random Halloween party with a bunch of normal people. But what if you’re going to that special Halloween benefit at MoMA? Or trick or treating up and down Chelsea? Here are a few costume ideas that will get you street cred in the art world.
Artists have been having informal apartment shows as long as anyone can remember but in the last few years there has been a growing trend in New York (particularly Brooklyn) of quirky apartment art exhibits that I hope continues to grow.
Last night, I stopped by Julie Torres’s apartment, you’ll remember her as the watercolor “street” artist, for a birthday celebration that included a lovely small show of all her artist friends. Torres not only curated the salon style display but carefully prepared a checklist, which made the experience of looking fun and enjoyable.
Arts Council England, a group within the English governmental Department of Art, Media and Sport, is an organization entirely devoted to funding the arts, performing, visual and literary. In total, the council currently funds 880 arts organizations and events. In September, “Britain’s coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats proposed a budget that could cut arts spending by as much as 25 percent,” reports the New York Times, a move that would help reduce the country’s budget deficit.
It’s still not clear where the budget cuts will lead, but it’s clear that artists and art organizations are speaking up against the disastrous impact the cuts could have.
The Brooklyn Museum’s catalog for their Fred Tomaselli exhibition is pretty mammoth for a show that only takes up three galleries. Still, the tome serves well as a way to expand on ideas presented in the exhibition and give a greater view of the artist’s work than would otherwise be possible in the limited space. Just do yourself a favor and don’t stop at the book version.
The diversity of works included in the catalog, from early installations and sculptures to constellation drug charts and later lacquered collages, is fascinating to see, but the ability to see so much at once also comes at a cost.
A founding member of Turkish contemporary art space SALT, Demir brings to NYUAD her training in non-Western modernism and commitment to global contemporary art and cultural production.
