Your favorite New Museum curatin’, balloon dog makin’, workshop ownin’ superstar contemporary artist, Mr. Jeff Koons, has now expanded his resume to include editorial photography for the New York Times Magazine.
Opinion
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Complex Cultural Politics of Indian, now Qatari, Painter M. F. Husain
Indian painter Maqbool Fida Husain has accept Qatari citizenship but the issues around his story are complex. Often depicted as a straight-forward case of censorship, reporters often gloss over the fact that the painter, often called the “Picasso of India,” has chosen to live in a nation that censors far more than India.
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Best of Richard Flood/Prairie Dogs … Redux
Our post this morning about the New Museum’s Richard Flood and his bizarre blogging-related remarks caused a frenzy of commentary and activity online. Check out the best from Twitter, our commenters, Jerry Saltz’s Facebook page, and the prairie dogs (aka bloggers) themselves!
We’ve decided to summarize some of the funniest and most clever things people have written (in no particular order) about the post written by the talented Lisa Radon. The comments have been edited for clarity.
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Why Can’t the World’s Best Architects Build Better Web Sites?
Writing for Fast Company, Alissa Walker sings the praise of the new architectural ”Facebook” called Architizer, but that’s not the extent of her post and she goes on to ask, “Why Can’t the World’s Best Architects Build Better Web Sites?” Good question.
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Art Bum Takes on Joannou, Saltz & “Hooverville”
I’m a big fan of artist Lawrence Swan’s Art Bum series, which follows the life of a frustrated artist who feels alienated from the sexy Art World of fame, fortune and major retrospectives. Given Art Bum’s critique of all things Art World, I was happy to see that Swan’s most recent strip targeted a number of personalities that are currently dominating art chatter in New York: collector/New Museum trustee Dakis Joannou, New York Magazine art critic/Facebook art celebrity Jerry Saltz, and artist/critic William Powhida.
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Searching For “The Greatest Living American Abstract Painter”
Modern Art Notes’ Tyler Green has a knack for wonderful ideas that create entertaining conversations about art, lest we forget his tweet that lead to the Super Bowl bet between the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Like the footbal bet, his latest idea also combines his two loves, sports and art, to create what he is calling, “The Greatest Living American Abstract Painter Tourney-ish.”
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Can Boston Pull Off An Art Revolution?
The city of Boston is not generally known for its hopping art scene. Although it is home to the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (which is the only publicly funded art university in the country), the patrician Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the picturesque Institute for Contemporary Arts the city cannot pretend to boast an art market that even holds a candle to that of New York, LA or Miami. A recent article by Paper Monument’s founding editor Dushko Petrovich in the Boston Globe proposes that the Boston art scene can bring something entirely different to the table than those acquisition driven hubs.
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Koons & Hadid Know the Name of the Game: Merchandizing
Jeff Koons and Zaha Hadid are A-listers that know that the real path to big bucks leads through the land of merchandizing! Koons has created a label for Kiehl’s Acai Damage-Protecting Toning Mist and Hadid is trying her hand at jewelry for Atelier Swarovski
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MoMA Acquires “@” But What Did They Get?
The Museum of Modern Art’s design department has been making some very unorthodox — though welcome — acquisitions in the last few years, including most recently the “@.” These are contributing to a greater sense that museums are no longer only object-based institutions, and that’s a good thing.
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Footnotes on Ai Weiwei & China’s Great Firewall
Chances are if you’ve been following art news in the past few weeks, you’ve seen the name Ai Weiwei. Ai’s been all over the place lately, having a public conversation with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, getting interviewed on CNN about the role of social media in Chinese politics, and documenting recent artist protests in Beijing. The artist was even announced as the eleventh commission for the London Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall installation series, a run of exhibitions featuring such luminaries as Doris Salcedo, Rachel Whiteread and Olafur Eliasson.
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You Talking to ME? De Niro Wants His Daddy’s Art Back
Robert De Niro Jr. won an ownership dispute over six works of art by his father Robert De Niro Sr. The infamous Salander-O’Reilly Galleries LLC had contested his claims on the artwork, but a bankruptcy judge found in favor of De Niro Jr. The De Niros were only two of the hundreds of people involved in a major scandal which led Salander-O’Reilly to declare bankruptcy in 2007.
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Rush Limbaugh’s Gaudy Fifth Avenue Penthouse
It’s always fun to scrutinize the private tastes of far right pundits who make it a sport to attack the art world or anything they don’t understand. So, it’s with great joy that we cast our eyes on the garish penthouse of the loudest right winger of them all, Rush Limbaugh.