Required Reading
This week, art forgeries, Frere-Jones on Jay Z's crappy album, food criticism drama, sound art resonates, the woman who was raped by Roman Polanski speaks, Boston's only graffiti park, Freudian analysis of sexting, 3D printing renaissance, and more.
This week, art forgeries, Frere-Jones on Jay Z’s crappy album, food criticism drama, sound art resonates, the woman who was raped by Roman Polanski speaks, Boston’s only graffiti park, Freudian analysis of sexting, 3D printing renaissance, and more.
Charles Hope reviews three books about art forgeries: Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age by Jonathon Keats (Oxford University Press), Art Forgery: The History of a Modern Obsession by Thierry Lenain (Reaktion), and Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger by Ken Perenyi (Pegasus). And ponders why it all seems to represent a very contemporary state of being:
It is often said that art forgery has existed as long as the demand for works of art, but this is not strictly true. There is no clear evidence that art forgeries as such existed in the ancient world. There were plenty of collectors, but they seem to have found copies just as desirable as originals. Even the presence of a signature was not necessarily taken as an indication that the object in question had been made by that artist. The notion of art forgery, as we understand it today, seems to require the idea that originals possess certain qualities not found even in the best copies. It also requires the presence of an expert with the ability to distinguish between the two; but such expertise does not seem to have existed in antiquity.
The New Yorker‘s music critic Sasha Frere-Jones has a devastating review of rapper Jay Z’s new album Magna Carta Holy Grail. He writes:
If you love Jay Z, it gives you that American feeling, that “Oh, Christ” feeling that makes you just want to sit down. It is music made for and by people who are in no danger of proximate harm. “Magna Carta Holy Grail” was made by someone who thought it would be appealing to invite the one per cent of the one per cent of the art world and dance for them, with them, for six hours, at a blue-chip art gallery.
… “Magna Carta Holy Grail” is a bunch of songs bagged up weakly by the form of the album, like trail mix that’s made by just putting things next to each other. The one good point is that “Magna Carta” contains some of the most vivid production Timbaland has recorded in years, all of it buried underneath cramped, dull rhymes that anyone could have written.
Speaking of which, if you haven’t seem Jay Z’s dull “performance art video” for “Picasso, Baby,” here it is:
Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features interviews with a number of artists in the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Soundings exhibitions that opens later this week. The exhibition focuses on contemporary sound art and is the first time such an extensive show of the art form has been organized by MoMA.
MoMA is conserving one of their major paintings by Jackson Pollock, “Number 1A, 1948” (1948), and they have an in-depth blog post about the evolving process.
Grant Snider’s new comic explores the “feud” in the Russian avant-garde between Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich.
After nearly 35 years of silence, the 13-year-old girl Roman Polanski raped in 1977 is finally telling her full story in a new book, The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski. The author Samantha Geimer doesn’t appear to be pulling any punches, and the cover of her book uses a photo of herself taken by Polanski a few weeks before her rape. How did she attain the photos? “The pictures surfaced during Geimer’s civil suit against Polanski, which she filed in 1988 and resulted in Polanski agreeing to pay her $500,000 plus interest (a sum Geimer struggled to collect).”
In the restaurant world, there’s a very interesting conversation going on about how restaurants should deal with critics and VIPs. The issue arose when New York Times food critic Pete Wells knocked the renowned Daniel restaurant down one star after a friend of his did not get the same service Wells did the same night. Eater asked restauranteurs and a former Times food critic how to cope with situations like this:
Q: What was your reaction to the Daniel review?
Former food critic Mimi Sheraton: Some critics, especially European ones, will argue that anonymity doesn’t matter, since there isn’t much a restaurant can change for a critic. I’ve always said that anyone who says that is a fool or a liar. There’s a lot that can be done with food and service. I saw it so many times.
Btw, if you haven’t read Wells’ Daniel review, you should; it has a lovely lede:
Your job may be worrying you, or your father’s health, or your own. You may have been up at 2 that morning drafting a better ending for a long-ago memory. But certain restaurants, if you can afford them, can knock down the barriers between you and happiness for a few hours. Every taste seems to transport you to another world, while every gesture of the staff convinces you that you live in the privileged center of this one.
Dezeen reports that Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum has acquired “Solid C2” by Patrick Jouin, which is the first item of furniture to be 3D-printed in one piece.
Related: The UPS Store has become the first major US retailer to offer 3D-printing services to the public. They will debut the service in six stores across the country. And NASA will be transporting a 3D printer into space for use on the International Space Station.
The rise and (probable) fall of Boston’s only graffiti park:
Meanwhile, if you want to see street art in Boston you have to go a place like the Institute for Contemporary Art, just a few miles from Dudley Square. There you’ll find the works of street artists like Os Gemeos and Barry McGee on display, far from the perceived dangers and marginality of Roxbury, safe inside the sanitized halls of a downtown art gallery.
It’s this paradigm that the new development at the Bartlett Yard will hope to shift in the coming years — a shift that will require, unfortunately, destroying Roxbury’s biggest public art space in recent history.
Every wonder what a Freudian analysis of sexting would say? Well:
The moralizing view of sexting and virtual sex suggests that Anthony Weiner called himself Carlos online because he had to bury his shame in an alias, and in his specific case, as in many others, that might be true. But this is to ignore the fact that Internet aliases are assumed constantly by people who are neither married nor in public service, and, for that matter, by people whose digital activities have nothing to do with sex at all. It’s to ignore the pleasure of not being yourself, of assuming a new identity not because you have to but because it’s fun to pretend. “The opposite of play is not seriousness but reality.”
And a quadcopter captures some beautiful images of New York, proving that these types of shots are no longer strictly the domain of high-budget Hollywood films or corporate commercials:
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.
