Tag: 01.13.17

Today’s AJBlog Highlight 01.13.17

Art Errors: Steve Cohen Evades Not Only the Feds, But Also the New Yorker’s Fact-Checkers When I read the art-related passages in the New Yorker‘s Total Return: When the feds went after a hedge-fund legend (aka Steve Cohen, the mega-collector ), all I could think of was: Where are the … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-01-13

Kennicott: Controversy Over Loan Of Painting For Trump Inaugural Is A Test

“The St. Louis museum isn’t backing off its commitment to send the painting to Washington, and the effort to stop it is a small pre-election skirmish in what will be a long, fraught and likely disorganized boycott of the Trump administration by artists, scholars, and citizens who align themselves with the arts and humanities sector. The petition, and the flurry of attention it raised, is important as a moment of what might be called the “stress testing” of this country’s cultural institutions. As Trump opponents look to the next four years, they want to know how much cultural and moral capital is stored in the institutions they love. Will museums and universities and arts centers be up to the challenge of confrontation, resistance and truth-telling?”

The Choice Of Tristram Hunt To Lead The V&A Museum Is Shocking

Few would doubt his interest in the art and heritage sectors, or his knowledge of his own academic field. But now that he is to be the director of one of them, does he still support the reintroduction of admission fees in national museums, which he proposed in 2011 as ‘a truly equitable cultural policy’?

“Fake Art” – Has Richard Prince Invented A New Kind Of Conceptual Art?

The phrase sort of made my head spin — is it possible Prince had just invented a whole new conceptual category of art? What could “fake art” mean? It certainly doesn’t mean “forgery,” and it can’t simply mean “bad art.” But it doesn’t seem to me simply to mean “work bought by someone the artist disapproves of” or even “work no longer condoned by the artist.” It seems — to me, anyway — to suggest something much squirrellier than that, some new way of thinking about how to navigate a news theater dominated by “fake news,” the disappearance of cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic authorities, and the rise of a disinformation state.

LA’s Construction Boom Is Provoking An Existential Crisis

“On the same Tuesday in March that will see Mayor Eric Garcetti facing no real opposition for reelection, L.A. voters will consider Measure S (once known as the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative), which calls for a two-year moratorium on major new development projects. Its backers say new construction is out of control — and out of scale with historically low-rise Los Angeles. What they can’t quite bring themselves to say is that the measure itself is an expression of mourning for an L.A. that is already dead, a city of single-family subdivisions, highway construction, discriminatory zoning and free parking that worked (to the degree that it ever did) only as long as the region continued to sprawl voraciously at the edges.”

The 24-Year-Old Choreographer Who Wants To Make Dance The Intersection Of Everything

“Artists fail when they aren’t able to make their art a brand,” says the choreographer and dancer, who is lean in an almost feline way, with thick muscles that propel him into lithe motion at the slightest provocation. “We want to be at the intersection of dance and fashion — of dance and advertising. How do we get dance to a wider audience?”