Required Reading
This week, New Yorker gets snarky, guns at MoMA, new Banksy, digitizing drawings, a literary classic is banned in North Carolina, and more
This week, New Yorker gets snarky, guns at MoMA, new Banksy, digitizing drawings, a literary classic is banned in North Carolina, and more.
This is easily the bitchiest/funniest/most insightful review of the Matthew Day Jackson show at Hauser & Wirth, and it is a short blurb at The New Yorker. It begins:
Want to see a very big show of very bad art? Sure you do, to be up on present trends in bigness and badness.
Why are there no guns at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)? Barbara Eldredge finds out in this podcast why none of the 28,000 objects in their design collection are guns.
DC-based art writer Tyler Green takes the Washington Post to task for whitewashing Smithsonian secretary G. Wayne Clough’s record at the museum:
The Post thus minimizes a significant intellectual and cultural story by treating it as the pet gripe of a fringe, marginal and lesser other, a completely false presentation of recent history. Clough’s censorship of “Hide/Seek” was opposed by a broad coalition of groups and individuals, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Association of Art Museum Directors, the American Library Association, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the College Art Association.
Though I should mention it’s odd that Green ignores the whole art blogosphere’s opposition (the most vocal opposition, in fact) to the event, since Green still appears to function with an old skool idea of what media matters and what doesn’t — which is particularly odd thing for a blogger like himself to do.
Is this a new Banksy? Appears so:
This week, the Morgan Library announced that it is digitizing its drawing collection:
The initiative will result in a digital library of more than 10,000 images, representing drawings spanning the fourteenth to twenty-first centuries, available free of charge on the Morgan’s website. The project will begin in October and is expected to be completed within one year, contributing significantly to the Morgan’s commitment to advancing drawings scholarship.
The images will be accessible in two formats: one for general identification and another for detailed study with enhanced resolution. Scholarly information about each drawing will be linked to a corresponding Morgan catalogue record. Importantly, the project includes approximately 2,000 images of versos (reverse sides) of drawings that contain rarely seen sketches or inscriptions by the artist. The digital library will be available on an open-access basis, and can be downloaded for non-commercial uses such as classroom presentations, dissertations, and educational websites devoted to the fine arts.
A time-lapse video of this year’s Burning Man. “The footage begins with the building of the city and continues until the fiery final night.” Watch:
American literary classic Invisible Man has been banned in North Carolina for having no “literary value.” The board of education in Randolph County voted 5-2 this week to remove all copies of the Ralph Ellison novel from school libraries. WTF?!
Thanks to @daweiner for point out that @giphy has an animated version of The Big Lebowski (1998) movie. It’s pretty impressive.
China’s draconian social media laws have landed a teenager in trouble for having 500 retweets. Gwynn Guifford reports:
As of last week, posting a message that the Chinese government deems inaccurate on social media platforms can get you three years in the slammer, provided it gets 500 retweets (or their equivalent) or 5,000 views.
… Yesterday afternoon, police in Zhangjiachuan County, Gansu province, detained a local teenager for “disrupting social order” when the teen’s post on microblogging service Sina Weibo about a suspicious death went viral, reports the Beijing Times (link in Chinese).
And thank you @shaneferro for pointing out that Popular Science might have one of the best news verticals ever: Science Confirms the Obvious.
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.
