Required Reading
This week, photographs and videos galore on Required Reading, including the most iconic image to emerge from the industrial disaster in Dhaka, prison photographs for sale as art, Chris Ware's lesbian Mother's Day cover, Kim Kardashian's Met ball fail, Cooper Union's fatal error, Gavin Brown on why f
This week, photographs and videos galore on Required Reading, including the most iconic image to emerge from the industrial disaster in Dhaka, prison photographs for sale as art, Chris Ware’s lesbian Mother’s Day cover, Kim Kardashian’s Met ball fail, Cooper Union’s fatal error, Gavin Brown on why fashion doesn’t get art, and more.
Reuters’s financial blogger Felix Salmon has been scrutinizing the Cooper Union tuition debacle and his latest post has some choice words for the leadership at the embattled school of higher learning:
When Cooper Union’s trustees, including Michaelson, took out a $175 million 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 5.875%, they knew exactly how much money Cooper would need to repay that mortgage every year.
And they had no idea where that money was going to come from.
This — much more than any endowment mismanagement — was the colossal, fatal error made by Cooper’s trustees.
The fascinating story of how an album of prison photographs ended up at Paris Photo LA with a $45,000 price tag:
Whether speculative or accurate, the $45,000 price is way beyond the reach of museums. Photography and art dealers who are limber by comparison to large, immobile museums are working the front lines of preservation.
“Some might say that selling [images such as these] is exploitation, but a dealer’s willingness to monotize something like this is one form of cultural preservation,” argues Haselhorst. “If I had not been in a position to both see the collection’s significance and commodify it, albeit well below the final $45,000 mark, these photographs could have easily ended up in the trash.”
h/t Jen Graves at The Slog
This week’s Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute ball featured the theme of “punk.” It was universally considered a fail and Kim Kardashian’s couch-like ensemble was considered the worst of them all. She was even cropped out of Vogue’s image of Kanye West. Gwyneth Paltrow announced post-ball that she’s never going again.
Related: Gallerist Gavin Brown talks to Style.com about the difference between the art and fashion worlds and he has a lot to say:
The fashion crowd doesn’t get anything right about art. The two tribes speak two entirely different languages. You are either on one side or the other. This is a particularly interesting week to think about the difference: the punk Met Ball and Frieze Art Fair. Both sides using the other to dress themselves up as something they are not, and destroying something essential about themselves in the process. The punk Met Ball was particularly hideous. The final enslavement of one of the most powerful postwar social movements. Reduced to Sarah Jessica Parker’s fauxhawk. A sad and accurate diagram of the state of our culture. A crowd of shiny morons turning reality inside out so it matches the echo chamber of their worldview. Would Sid have been invited? What would he have thought? Is this what Mark Perry meant by “This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band”? The English art schools of the sixties and seventies — the cradle of this creative movement — must be writhing in their supply-side straightjackets. It only emphasizes to me that fashion — whatever that is — sees art (and artists) as an idiot-savant gimp, and they keep them on a leash, begging for glam snacks. And fashion follows along behind art, picking up its golden shit.
The Museum of Modern Art is having some second thoughts about tearing down the former American Folk Art Museum building after numerous protests.
A photo of two bodies embracing in the aftermath of the garment factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh, has become the most iconic image of the industrial disaster that has claimed roughly a thousand lives. Taken by photographer Taslima Akhter, she described her reaction to the scene this way: “When I saw the couple, I couldn’t believe it. I felt like I knew them — they felt very close to me.”
A Spanish organization called the Aid to Children and Adolescents at Risk Foundation has created lenticular public display ads about child abuse that relay different messages to adults and children:
This week’s Google doodle for famed illustrator and designer Saul Bass was a pleasure to behold:
Linguists have identified a few “ultraconservative” words that they believe haven’t changed much for 15,000 years:
A team of researchers has come up with a list of two dozen “ultraconserved words” that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: “mother,” “not,” “what,” “to hear” and “man.” It also contains surprises: “to flow,” “ashes” and “worm.”
And finally, how a Facebook system update would look like in real life:
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning EST, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts or photo essays worth a second look.
