Opinion - Hyperallergic (Page 127)

Opinion

Required Reading

This week, a chilling performance in Shanghai, the sale of the Washington Post, history of London coffeehouses, privacy and art, TED Talk as propaganda, and more.

Opinion

Weekend Words: Sound

Yesterday, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, opened Soundings: A Contemporary Score, the museum's first major exhibition of sound art. But will it answer the question, "If a piece of art falls in the forest and no one hears it, is it still art?"

Opinion

Miami Police Kill 18-Year-Old Street Artist

Israel Hernández-Llach of Miami was tagging a shuttered McDonalds in Miami Beach when he was approached by police and fled. It's unclear exactly how the situation unfolded from there, but Hernández-Llach was soon dead, the result of a police tazering. The officers claimed that they shocked their vic

Opinion

Styling Booty: Race, Class, and Divas

CHICAGO — The exploitative fashion shoot OFFICIAL GLAM GIRL for DIS Magazine is yet another disappointing instance of black womens' bodies as objects of an unsmiling capitalism, an order ruled smirkingly by a white woman performing a blinged out, pimp-like gender.

Opinion

Lady Gaga Doing the Marina Abramović Method Is Satire, Right?

Lady Gaga has long been desperate for art world attention. Now, she's collaborating with the artists who has long been desperate for pop culture cred, Marina Abramović.

Opinion

Amazing Cache of Vintage Films: East Village 1980s, NYC Subway 1960s/40s, David Hockney 1960s

Thanks to the bloggers at Bowery Boogie, I've discovered an incredible cache of rare video clips from the 20th century, including this footage of the rough and tumble streets of the East Village during the late 1980s and the city's subways system in the 1960s.

Opinion

LACMA Restaurant Hires Water Sommelier, Launches 45-Page Water Menu [UPDATE]

"Water is essential to life," notes the opening sentence of the "Tasting Water" menu at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's in-house Ray's and Stark's Bar restaurant, which has just launched the 45-page menu and hired Martin Riese, a "water sommelier." It's the sort of believability-tickling ploy

Opinion

Bad Art Definitely Bad, Science Confirms

A study in the latest edition of the British Journal of Aesthetics portends to determine whether aesthetics are assessed through exposure, as held in a widely cited prior work of research, or if there's a discernibly innate common component to human judgments of visual value.

Opinion

Taking Stock of Amazon Art

In May, we broke the story that Amazon was planning to add art to their online offerings, and yesterday the deed was done: the company's Fine Art store (beta) was born.

Opinion

Sometimes a GIF Is All You Need

Today and yesterday were glorious days in New York: August had come, the sun was shining, the weather was just right. They were the type of days that make you want to frolic, or skip or swing. And so it happened, when I clicked on a link in a tweet by pioneering net artist and critic Olia Lialina, t

Opinion

The Kitsch of Death, or Andy Warhol's Birthday Livestream

Eighty-five years ago today, Andrej Varhola, Jr., was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He would go on to become the famous Andy Warhol, whose artwork decorates the walls of museums and, most recently, Perrier bottles. In honor of that birthday, the Andy Warhol Museum has set up a live webcam feed o

Opinion

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.