The name Joseph J. Lhota may not be a household one (yet), but the current Republican mayoral candidate has done a lot in his time in New York City politics. Art worlders may remember him as the man who led the Giuliani administration’s push to bully the Brooklyn Museum into censoring an artwork from the Sensation exhibition.
MTA
Posted inNews
MTA Rejects Advertising for Looking Too Much Like Graffiti
The Museum of Modern Art may be one step closer to recognizing graffiti as a legitimate art form, but New York City is not. Writer Adam Mansbach, who took part in last week’s “Writers and Writers” event at MoMA, has a post on the Awl about being denied subway advertising space that he was prepared to pay for because the writing in his ad looked too much like graffiti.
Posted inOpinion
A New, Even More Graphic Anti-Islamic Subway Ad
Remember that subway poster that compared Muslims to savages and called for supporting Israel in order to “defeat Jihad”? The group behind that sloganeering, the American Defense Freedom Initiative (AFDI), is back with a second, even more inflammatory ad that the MTA is explicitly disavowing.
Posted inOpinion
A Subway Platform Becomes a Front Porch
I’ve always enjoyed riding the subway impossible distances — out to Coney Island, say, or the Far Rockaways — largely because the cityscape and the scenery change so much along the way. Traveling out to the ends of various lines transports you away from the New York City you know.
Posted inNews
New York MTA to Roll Out a Public Art App
LOS ANGELES — The New York subway has always featured a host of great public art. From Tom Otterness’s famous figurines causing mischief at 14th Street and Eighth Avenue to the performers at Union Square and Times Square, the MTA’a Arts for Transit program provides a welcome respite from the usual grind of taking the subway.