News
All art lovers have had those revelatory moments when visual art just blows our minds. It's surprising, beautiful, provocative, painful, confusing and every kind of emotion at once. I think that's what the small child in this video is feeling when he wanders into one of Yayoi Kusama's infinite dot r
![Hong Kong Media: Ai Weiwei Confessed to Tax Charges Under Torture [UPDATE 2]](/content/images/size/w600/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2011/04/awwtorture_home.jpg)
News
Hong Kong news channel and media organization RTHK is reporting that Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has confessed to tax charges under torture. The original article came from a reporter claiming to work for Xinhua, the state-run media mouthpiece of the Chinese government.
Art
Samantha Beverly (aka @kalofos) has created the funniest example of mail art that has arrived at Hyperallergic HQ yet. In her contribution to the Mail Art Bulletin, Beverly has transformed the greatest piece of contemporary spam — the West African email scam — into a hand-drawn scroll complete with
Performance
Screaming Females are one of those bands who are just that good; they have an unwavering idea about who they are and what they want to do, have worked relentlessly to get where they are and have retained their weirdo aesthetic throughout. In the past two years, the band has gained the attention of i
Art
Artist John Fekner recently found this previously unpublished photograph of a subway billboard street art piece from 1983. This work transforms a Newsday newspaper poster in the Ely/23rd Street subway station in Long Island City, Queens, into a more ominous scene. Unlike street art interventions tod
News
Internet users looking for information on Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's arrest will now find another roadblock put in their way, as Ai Weiwei-related hashtags are now being spammed by Chinese-language bots. Hashtags including #aiweiwei and #freeaiweiwei are being bombarded with semi-risque jokes and on
News
On April 19, Barcelona's iconic Sagrada Familia Basilica, designed by famed architect Antoni Gaudi, caught fire. A fire burned inside the structure for over 45 minutes before firefighters could put it out, destroying the church's sacristy and badly damaging the crypt.
News
The Los Angeles Police Department caught and arrested two French nationals vandalizing buildings with “buckets of grout and pieces of tile” near the LA Museum of Contemporary Art's Little Tokyo gallery this past Friday. One of the vandals seems to be the famed French street artist Space Invader, rep
Books
The Studio Museum in Harlem's Fall 2010 Studio magazine, a publication that functions as newsletter, press release and behind-the-scenes peek at the museum's operation, doesn't exactly look institutional. This edition is covered by a mottled, fibrous layer of paper that obscures the magazine itself.
![War Photographer Tim Hetherington Killed in Libya [UPDATED]](/content/images/size/w600/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2011/04/tim-hetherington-home.jpg)
News
War photographers help us witness pain, discover injustice and make sense of abstractions that are fed to us by our governments and leaders. They are the front line of image creators and they capture frightening, incredible, tender and unthinkable pictures that shock and enlighten us. Their jobs are
Opinion
A month ago, artists Michelle Vaughan and John Powers made a bar bet — I'm guessing it was a drunken one — over one of Powers's bombastic claims. He made the sweeping statement that "movies are the art of our time." Not one to step away from a challenge, Vaughan disagreed. Eventually Vaughan, who is
Art
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 indicati