Required Reading Debuts
Mary Louise Schumacher on Steve Martin's art world novel — Carolina Miranda on the "new shape of street art" in ARTnews — "Smithsonian" of Arab art in Qatar — Filip Dujardin's architectural remixes — Star Wars Modern blogs on art and technology
Starting today and continuing every Sunday morning at 7am EST, Hyperallergic will be posting a short list of art-related links. Some may be long-form articles or videos of interest, while others may be short blog posts or photo essays. Whatever they are, you can be assured they will be worth a second look.
Required Reading will bring you what you need to know in 10 links or less. We hope you enjoy a leisurely Sunday catching up on the week’s best.
Mary Louise Schumacher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reviews Steve Martin‘s new book, An Object of Beauty. A taste: “But the novel is more than an art-world takedown. Martin … reminds us of art’s transcendent nature, too.”
The January 2011 edition of ARTnews magazine features a cover story by Carolina Miranda on the “new shape of street art.” BONUS LINK: “Street Art: Das Musical” via Rebel:art
The Economist explores the new “Smithsonian” in Doha, Qatar that will showcase modern art in the Arab world. I have to say that I usually avoid propagating the notion of an “Arab country” rather than a country where Arabs are a majority since there are many minorities — many of whom are indigenous — that still live in those same nations (Copts of Egypt, Aramaic of Syria, Assyrians of Iraq … ) and the notion of an Arab country diminishes their importance.
Swissmiss points us towards the Photoshop creations of Filip Dujardin, who takes photographs of nondescript buildings and remixes them into architectural fantasies. I think they look quite a bit like late Soviet architecture.
John Powers, who you may know as Star Wars Modern, has been evolving a lengthy series named Art Then Technology. His latest post (part 6) explains:
Just as Art is a modern technology, a denatured form of systematized knowledge totally unlike its premodern anticents on display at the Cloisters, and far more closely related to the moden technology of scientific knowledge … , modern authority is a modern technology distinct from early forms of authority.
A sculptor and blogger, Powers has a voracious appetite for digesting disparate ideas. His recent series offers a lot to chew on, and I enjoy how he uses his blog an evolving notebook of ideas that offers some insight into the anxieties and realities of a 21st century sculptor in New York. Here are the other posts in the series:
- Part 1: “I Want to Be a Verb“
- Part 2: “Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop Back“
- Part 3: “Hitchhiking in Flatland“
- Part 4: “Sympathetic Summery [sic]”
- Part 5: “Abstract Art Is a Technology” — perhaps the best title?
Image caption: Left, one of Filip Dujardin’s architectural Fictions, right, the Georgian Ministry of Highway Construction (image) building in Tbilisi, Georgia, which was constructed during the late Soviet period.
