“‘There are fantastic French artists out there,’ said Allegra Pesenti, curator of the Hammer Museum’s Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. For Pesenti, the only problem has been finding them. ‘The thing that’s always surprised me is that there are great galleries in Paris, and yet they show so few French artists.'”
Tag: 04.15.12
Let’s Not Put On These Google Glasses
“Today, social media are hailed for empowering dissidents and undercutting tyrannies around the world. Yet it’s hard not to watch the Google video and agree with Forbes’s Kashmir Hill when she suggests that such a technology could ultimately ‘accelerate the arrival of the persistent and pervasive citizen surveillance state,’ in which everything you see and do can be recorded, reported, subpoenaed … you name it.”
The Prime Minister May Try To Kill Libraries, But They Refuse To Die
“Trestle tables are strewn with everything from well-thumbed copies of Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize winner, to a pristine biography of Sigmund Freud. Children sit on the grass listening to storytellers. William Orbit plays from a portable sound system. An upright coffin with the words ‘RIP Barnet Libraries’ on the side leans against the tent. Here, on a patch of green in an entirely unassuming part of north London, the ‘People’s Library’ is in full swing.”
Changing The Faces Of Dance In Los Angeles
Renae Williams Niles, one of the most powerful dance people in L.A., “is highly regarded for her business acumen and knowledge of the art. Her unpretentiousness and sunny disposition have also won her fans. And she is an anomaly in the field: A rare female executive at a large multi-disciplinary performing arts facility who is young (38), African American, a former dancer (with the Lula Washington Dance Theatre) and a homegrown Angeleno (since age 13).”
Making Art In Relative Isolation – And Putting It Everywhere
“Even in stable times life can be hard for artists in West Africa. Not that art ever stops being made. Cities like Abidjan, Dakar in Senegal, and Bamako in Mali are saturated in it. Murals cover public walls and the sides of trucks and buses. Pottery, metalwork and weaving, in styles new and old, fill open-air markets. Portraits of jazzy beauties, Sufi saints and culture heroes (Che, Mandela, Obama, Madonna) are for sale everywhere.”