Required Reading
This week, a massive Mayan city has been unearthed, street artists are being targeted in extreme ways by police, Sicilian authorities may derail a major art show, abstract art dominates 1% buying habits, a LA woman was killed for taking a photo, and more.
This week, a massive Mayan city has been unearthed, street artists are being targeted in extreme ways by police, Sicilian authorities may derail a major art show, abstract art dominates 1% buying habits, a LA woman was killed for taking a photo, and more.
This week, archeologists in Mexico announced that an entire Mayan city full of pyramids and palatial complexes has been discovered in the jungles of southeastern Mexico. The newly discovered site, called Chactún, stretches over roughly 54 acres (22 hectares) and it is believed that be dated to Maya Late Classic period (600–900 ACE). Live Science has more information in English, as does Discovery, and Le Monde (for those who read French) has an extensive report from AFP. There is also a video report about the find (in Spanish):
A successful property surveyor was jailed this week after his secret life as a tagger was uncovered. He was sentenced to 16 months, while Stuart Hall, the BBC broadcaster who was convicted of child abuse this past week, only got 15 months. Someone who, like the tagger that was convicted, also has a “respectable” job during the day and does graffiti at night penned a must-read article discusses the lengths that police will go to in their efforts to track and convict graffiti and street artists:
I started getting invited to art exhibitions of legal graffiti writers’ work. After a year of not painting illegally, hoping I’d been forgotten about, I started attending these events and doing gallery shows. I put my name out there and was doing good things, I thought. But the British transport police graffiti squad attend those events, too, and take covert photographs of everyone. They took a photo of me, studied it and realised who I was. They had been chasing me for 12 years and now they had me on camera. They started building a case based on that one photograph. They didn’t have a single picture of me committing an offence, but they went to Yahoo, Google and Flickr and got permission to download all my conversations with magazines and websites.
I’ve heard this type of thing for ages, even in New York, so when the NSA revelations came out recently I have to say that I wasn’t really surprised. It seems like the next step in a governmental culture of surveillance that has been around for quite some time.
In the world of social media are we “one another’s virtual enablers“? Jenna Wortham has penned a fascinating piece:
Part of our increasing looseness with what we post on the Web has to do with the realization that one raunchy photo is just a single data point among hundreds. But Coye Cheshire, a professor of information sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies how we interact online, thinks there might be something more complex at play. In his research, he has highlighted the power of social approval. In a study of social exchange systems like Facebook, when people were told that their networks liked the content they were sharing, they shared more. But when they were told that people in their network did not like their shared content, they actually shared even more to figure out what their network might like, and “come up with more content that was edgier,” he said.
Protests in Sicily over the loan of two prized objects in a touring American exhibition, Sicily: Art and Invention Between Greece and Rome, may derail the whole thing. And the controversy may also signal difficulty with future museum loans:
Sicilian officials now say that two star attractions — a dramatic six-foot-tall statue of a charioteer and an immaculate gold libation bowl, or phiale — should not travel to Cleveland because their absence is depriving Sicily of tourist dollars.
… In an e-mail response to questions on Friday, Ms. Sgarlata, who is the assessor of culture for the Region of Sicily, asked, “How would an American tourist react who, trusting his Frommer’s travel guide, has gone out of his way to visit the island of Mozia to admire this work of art in its original setting, only to discover that the statue is in Tokyo or St. Petersburg?”
… “I believe that these imbalanced exchanges” with American museums “have run their course,” Ms. Sgarlata said in her e-mail. “We are open to exchanges, if duly considered, and especially if they respect the concept of authentic reciprocity.”
“Abstract art, the form that dominated the 20th century, once again reigns supreme at the 44th edition of Art Basel,” according to The Art Newspaper. I said the same thing about art at the 2012 Art Basel Miami Beach fair. Seems abstract is very very “in” at the moment for the top of the art market.
A thought-provoking essay in Guernica by writer Kiese Laymon explores what it means to write “multiculturally.”
A woman in LA was stabbed to death by a homeless man after she took his photo:
After pulling out her cell phone and snapping a photograph of the transients, the men began demanding money in exchange for the photos. When the two women refused to hand over money, they were attacked, and Calderon was stabbed in the torso. She was taken to a local hospital, where she later died of her injuries during surgery.
LAist has more on the story and a photo believed to be the men involved in the stabbing.
This week in bizarre copyright court cases … a photographer is suing BuzzFeed for $3.6M over their “viral sharing model”:
The lawsuit, filed in New York earlier this month, claims BuzzFeed owes more than $3.6 million in damages as a result of the soccer pic appearing on 64 sites around the web. According to Eiselein, who uploaded the original image to Flickr, BuzzFeed is liable for “contributory infringement” because the site’s viral news model encourages readers to share the content they find.
As a follow up to our Playboy Marfa story, the name of the artist responsible for that hideous thing has been revealed, it is, of course, Richard Phillips, who makes “high-brow-ish fan art.” This is a stain on curator Neville Wakefield’s rep IMO. The ambient YouTube video that accompanies the project is all shades of meh:
Marion Maneker of Art Market Monitor wants to remind us that collectors can often be visionaries, like William Paley:
Commentators now regularly sneer at “vulgar oligarchs” who are believed to collect only as an ostentatious display of wealth. Instead, museums as agents of the “public trust” are presumed to be better advocates and trustees of art and art history. Those notions ignore the central role of individual collectors in accumulating and preserving works that are not recognized.
Speaking of the 1%, wonder where most of the ultra-rich live? The biggest chunk live in North America, but Asia-Pacific is catching up fast. North America’s wealthy spend the most on art, 19.1% of their assets, and the least on sports, 4.7%.
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.
