Bruce LaBruce

If you can score a ticket, Seven on Seven will be the place to spend your Saturday. It’s the art-and-tech gathering of the spring, and the names alone are a big draw: What art-tech projects will Ai Weiwei and Nate Silver come up with? That event, held at the New Museum, is already sold out. Tickets are still available for MoMA’s screening of films by Bruce LaBruce, though, and it’s about sex terrorists. Not your typical MoMA fare, there. And if you like spending your free time basking in the sunshine, there’s several open-studio events taking place over the weekend that’ll require trekking in-and-out of doors. Plenty of events for vampires and sun-lovers alike!

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Mon

New York University - Interactive Telecommunications Program

721 Broadway, 4th Floor
New York, New York
7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.Website

Four Scenarios for New Media

Every year since 1993, NYU’s “Future of New Media” class gives public presentations on how technology may affect our lives in the coming years. It’s like Black Mirror, but without the “technology will turn all of us into horrible people” part. Hear about the year 2025, and what may come to pass with panel topics devoted to the “super-semantic web,” where you can converse with the entire internet, and “post-automation culture,” where people outsource their CV to others.

 

Tue

MoMA

11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY
7:00 p.m.Website

Give Piece of Ass a Chance and The Raspberry Reich (discussion by Bruce LaBruce)

A screening by Toronto director Bruce LaBruce, his films Give Piece of Ass a Chance and The Raspberry Reich feature sex terrorists and “slogans for the homosexual intifada.”

Light Industry

155 Freeman Street
Brooklyn, NY
7:30 p.m. Website

Quality Television: a screening and lecture by Martine Syms

Artist Martine Syms likes TV. She’s curated a selection of short films and videos dealing with TV as a social medium, a “resource for aesthetics, values, metaphors and community.” Knowing a thing or two about some of these artists, like Dara Birnbaum and Mike Smith, the screening should be filled with humor, too.

Features work by Nicole Miller, Dara Birnbaum, Remy/Grand Central, Lex Brown, Stan Douglas, Ximena Cuevas, Michael Smith, Sondra Perry, Joan Logue, and Martine Syms

Wed

Art 3

109 Ingraham Street #102
Brooklyn, NY 11237
7:00 p.m.Website

Sergio Purtell: Architectures of Disappearance Talk

Sergio Purtell documents Brooklyn’s changing post-industrial landscapes through haunting black-and-white photography. He will be joined by Thomas Roma and Susan Kismaric (former curator of photography at MoMA) for a discussion about his work.

Thu

Derek Eller Gallery

615 W 27th Street
New York, NY
6:00 - 8:00 p.m.Website

Jesse Greenberg: Face Scan

With Greenberg’s living sculpture, you’re under surveillance. Lenses peer out of inanimate, goopy plastic, petri dishes bubble over with a “painterly stew,” and paintings simulate oozing bubbles. It sounds like Videodrome-meets-Modernism, at a science-fair. Fun.

 

Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel

448 East 116th Street
New York, NY 10029
Event begins with exhibition tour at Hunter East Harlem followed by short walk to church; 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.Website

Nicole Cohen: On Location

Come to church, stay for the art. Nicole Cohen’s eerie footage of East Harlem gives the sense of a techno-spiritual meditation on place; in her videos, she layers storefronts and facades with colorful rays of light. Sentimental, maybe. Beautiful, definitely.

Fri

Runs Friday through the weekend (see individual programs for specific times and dates)

Open Studios: SVA, LMCC, Triangle Arts Association, and Sharpe-Walentas

Open studios! It’s that time of the semester when MFA students and artists-in-residence across the city open their doors to strangers, letting them gawk and walk around works in progress. Please, don’t step on the art. A few of the events, highlighted below.

School of Visual Arts (SVA) MFA Open Studios

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Open Studios

Triangle Arts Association Open Studios

Sharpe-Walentas Open Studios

 

Sat

New Museum

235 Bowery
New York, New York
12:00 - 6:00 p.m. Website

Seven on Seven

Big names permeate this year’s Seven on Seven, an annual event pairing an artist and technologist to make “something.” For the event’s 7th edition, “Empathy & Disgust,” artist Ai Weiwei was paired with computer-security analyst (and hacker) Jacob Appelbaum; “conceptual entrepreneur” Martine Syms with ThinkUp co-founder Gina Trapani; and relational-aesthetics artist Liam Gillick with statistician Nate Silver. On Saturday (if you can nab tickets), come hear them unveil their projects.

Transfer

1030 Metropolitan Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
7:00 - 11:00 p.m. Website

Rollin Leonard: New Portraiture

Finish out the day of getting your tech geek on with a visit to Transfer for Rollin Leonard’s skillful photographs of seamlessly hacked, morphed, and reassembled body parts.

Sun

MANA Contemporary

888 Newark Ave.
Jersey City, NJ 07306
1:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.Website

The Future Is Forever: Ten Years of the ICP-Bard MFA Program

Call it a class reunion: the International Center for Photography-Bard MFA program has been around for 10 years. The exhibition features work by alums and newbies alike, with works by Christine Callahan, Hernease Davis, Joseph Desler Costa, Dillon DeWaters, Christian Erroi, Nona Faustine Simmons, Tatiana Kromberg, Garret Miller, Jorge Alberto Perez, Libby Pratt, Liz Sales, David Smith, Willy Somma, Daniel Temkin, Kim Weston, and Hannah Whitaker.

The show is in Jersey City, near the Journal Square PATH station, but the ICP is offering free shuttles every half hour starting at 12:30 PM from Milk Studios (450 W. 15th Street, New York, NY 10011). Sign up for a free trip to Jersey here!

 

• My Selfie in 3D to “immortalize your couple.” [My Selfie in 3D via @therourke]
• The “golden ratio” that you learned in art school—and that someone you went to art school with has a dumb tattoo of—is totally fake. [Fast Company]
• Women have been part of electronic music since forever. You can listen to the proof with the playlist “Women In Electronic Music 1938-1982.” Hours of music! [Synthtopia]
• Try not to throw up in your mouth and/or punch a wall while reading this smug real-estate investor describe his tactics for displacing black residents to make more money from white ones. [New York Magazine]
• The Triennial closes this weekend. Only a few days left to say you saw SWAT-team Teletubbies.  [New Museum]
• Christoph Büchel’s Venice Biennale mosque has definitely been shut down. Exhibition organizers have 60 days to appeal the local council’s decision. [The Art Newspaper]
• Get your zines and artist books ready for the NY Art Book Fair. Applications for the fair, held at MoMA PS1, are due on May 31. [Printed Matter]
• Artist who wears robotic cat ears designs a terrifying cyberpunk virtual-reality environment. Somehow I’m not terribly surprised. [Motherboard]
• Worst dance-related photo of the day. [Reddit]
• Grayson Perry: wonderful performer, but paltry at pots. [The Guardian]

Elijah Burgher, “‘6 Organs’ Ritual,” 2013.

Oh, boy-o. Ideas City, the New Museum’s all-things-city conference returns, and it seems to have scattered away most other art events for the weekend. That, or everyone else is really excited about going to the beach. For those of us who’ll be in the city, there’s an array of talks, from 1980s goth culture at the Morbid Anatomy Museum to a symposium on psychoacoustics at ALLGOLD. New York, you never ever bore us.

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Wed

FUG

431 East 6th Street
New York, NY 10009
7:00 p.m. Website

Campus Rape Knit-In: Guerrilla Girls BroadBand Led by Alla Horska

Knitters unite, and make your own Guerrilla Girls balaclava (pattern available for free download) at the Bruce’s new FUG gallery. Check out the Guerrilla Girls BroadBand exhibition while you’re there, too.

Thu

Morbid Anatomy Museum

424A 3rd Avenue
Brooklyn, New York 11215
8:00 p.m. (admission $8.00)Website

A Desire for Dramaticism: Semiotics of the 1980s Goth Subculture

Andi Harriman, music anthropologist and author of Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace: A Worldwide Compendium of Postpunk and Goth in the 1980s, presents an illustrated lecture on the aesthetic history of Goth leading up to the early 1990s. The talk will focus on the visual signals members of the subculture utilized to communicate their identity to the mainstream. We couldn’t be more excited about this event; at least one member of the AFC staff wrote their graduate thesis partially about black lipstick.

New Museum, Cooper Union, others

New York, NY
Day-long events held Thursday through SaturdayWebsite

Ideas City

Want to know how to think about and create the city of tomorrow? Go to Ideas City. With over 100 free Ideas City events, it’s hard to know which ones to attend. You may as well go with your gut, or, in some cases, your nose (Saturday includes a smog-tasting event). What you should know: Thursday and Friday’s events are ticketed, while Saturday’s are mostly street-fair style in the Lower East Side.

On Thursday:

Ideas City conference, 9:30 – 7:30 p.m. (ticketed event)

Highlights include:

Keynote: Lawrence Lessig on “Seeing Through the Noise,”  on art, culture, and data

Panel discussion: Full Disclosure and the Morality of Information, with Trevor Paglen, Christopher Soghoian, Jillian C. York, and Gabriella Coleman (moderator) (ticketed event)

Panel discussion: Mayoral panel, with the mayors of Houston, San Juan, and Ithaca, moderated by radio celeb Kurt Andersen (ticketed event)

 

Zieher Smith & Horton

516 West 20th Street
New York, New York 10011
6:00 - 8:00 p.m. Website

Elijah Burgher: Bachelors

“Gay Death Cult” is the title of an essay by Allan Doyle accompanying Elijah Burgher’s exhibition, which should give you a hint at what’s in store with this exhibition of colored-pencil portraits of cultish, stoic nudes (you might have seen them at the 2014 Whitney Biennial), prints, and paintings on drop cloths.

Fri

NEW INC

231 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
Website

Deep Lab at Ideas City

Cyberfeminist research group Deep Lab is gonna be the best part of Ideas City. “Formed” at Carnegie Mellon University’s Studio for Creative Inquiry in 2014, the group has published essays ranging on topics from hacking to tracking down the physical internet on city streets. NEW INC is hosting the artists, technologists, and writers in Deep Lab for a week-long residency, resulting in what looks like a great day of talks on Friday (there’s a drone painting demonstration on Thursday, and a walking tour on Saturday, too).

Full schedule, here.

Sat

Locations vary

12:00 - 6:00 p.m. Website

Ideas City: Street Program

For Ideas City’s Saturday events, expect a street fair with eco-friendly architecture disbursed throughout. Among the gazillion events, we’ve spotted a smog-tasting and a sewer in a suitcase.

ALLGOLD MoMA PS1 Print shop

22-01 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, New York 11101
4:00 - 10:00 p.m. Website

AVANT.org presents: SONIC RESEARCH: Psychoacoustics Session I

Do you know anything about psychoacoustics? You will, after Saturday’s symposium on contemporary sound art and how we experience it, in both body and mind. With talks, presentations, installations, and performances by Ron Kuivila, professor of Music, Wesleyan University; Seth Cluett, artist and composer, Professor Stevens Institute of Technology; C Lavender, sound artist; Sophie Landres, PhD candidate in Art History, Stony Brook University & Mellon Fellow at Creative Time; Josh Millrod, artist and M.M.T. candidate, Music Psychiatrics, NYU; Jules Gimbrone, artist and composer; A.K. Burns, artist, co-founder W.A.G.E., Callicoon Gallery; and Suzanne Dikker, research scientist, NYU.

 

• This is old news, but too adorable to forget. A Colombian man and his two children cover Depeche Mode songs using a mix of homemade instruments, toy keyboards, and an incongruously upbeat attitude. They are pretty much the cutest family in the world. [YouTube]

• World Factory, an interactive theatrical production by Zoe Svendsen, casts the audience members as capitalists running a Chinese sweatshop. Dishearteningly, even left-leaning London theatergoers tended to make decisions based on profit margins rather than ethics. [The Guardian]

• From “The Obliteration Room” to “Please Touch The Art,” does all art now have to be some combination of family-friendly and Instagram-friendly? [Vulture]

• The Santa Monica Museum of Art is having a moving sale! While they haven’t announced where they are reopening, they have announced what to expect for sale: everything from tech equipment and art supplies to furniture including pink bean bag chairs. West Coast friends, hurry! The sale ends tomorrow. [NBC Los Angeles]

• The City of New York is being sued by members of the Illuminator Art Collective. Kyle Depew, Grayson Earle, and Yates McKee claim the NYPD violated their First Amendment rights when arresting them for “unlawful posting of advertisements.” The three were digitally projecting political messages on the side of the Metropolitan Museum of Art while right-wing billionaire Ed Koch hosted a gala inside. They claim that political speech is not an advertisement, and that they technically “posted” nothing—merely projected light from a public space. [The Wall Street Journal]

• Holla at your grrrls at KLAM radio! The podcast and art installation, broadcast from the mysterious town of San Ranchito, California, features big-name comedians, public-radio celebs (like Jonathan Goldstein and Starlee Kine), and artists (Eleanor Antin). It doesn’t go live until later this week, but I’m expecting Prairie Home Companion meets Pee-Wee’s Playhouse? That’s what I’m hoping for. Hosted by art historian Anna Kryczka and artist Lenae Day. Woo! [KLAM Radio]

• For June 2015, ARTnews publishes an all-women-themed issue. From what we’ve read so far, all the writers can agree there’s still no parity in the art world for female artists and arts administrators. Which should be obvious to anyone who’s worked in museums, or been to one for that matter—right? Personally, I like Amelia Jones’s approach in “On Sexism in the Art World”; she advises us to pay more attention to the “alt” spaces, in contrast to mega-museums, that are actually doing things right. Let’s just give these spaces more visibility. [ARTnews]

• W.A.G.E. and Art Agenda were going to establish equitable compensation standards for  commissioning digital works of art. Here’s why that project fell through. [e-flux]

• Artists in Beirut are fighting the relentless march of gentrification and demolition by repurposing some of few remaining historical structures in the city. [Time]

• Here’s some bad news for preservationists: Tokyo’s storied, beloved Hotel Okura will meet the wrecking ball, despite outcry from architects and fans of midcentury modernism. [Curbed]

• Eff, yeah, freedom! The Patriot Act has expired. Downside is that most likely, we only have a day or two before the Senate will reinstate some elements of the data-collection act. [Electronic Frontier Foundation]
• Artists in Hungary protest the government’s appointment of right-leaning cultural officials by holding an anti-government biennial, the Off Biennale Budapest. [The Art Newspaper]
• Big D projects wanted in Dallas. The 2015 Aurora festival is seeking digital-minded public art proposals—including apps—for this year’s festival. [Aurora]
• Paddy Johnson on the difference between the Suicide Girls’ Instagram prints and Richard Prince’s. [artnet News]
• If you buy a Suicide Girls print, they’re only $90. Profits go toward the Electronic Frontier Foundation (see above). Art collector Alain Servais tells Twitter he purchased one. [Suicide Girls Shop]
• Last week marked the 22nd anniversary of Super Mario Bros., the movie featuring John Leguizamo, Bob Hoskins, and Dennis Hopper. While this isn’t at all newsworthy unto itself, it’s a good excuse to ask the question: How the hell did the screenwriters/production designers squeeze THAT plot and insanely complete vision of an alternate reality out of a dumb video game? Seriously… from the costumes to details like a bumper-car-overhead-grid powering city traffic, that film was gloriously trippy as hell and had almost nothing to do with the Nintendo game. It was a huge flop at the box office and wildly unpopular with the franchise’s fans. But rewatch it as an adult. Trust us. It’s like if John Waters made a mashup of Blade Runner and Dune for children…with dinosaurs. [WTVY]
• New art museum job postings! [New York Foundation for the Arts]
• Surprise! Yet another super-tall, super-luxury megatower is coming to the southern end of Central Park. The historic Helmsley Park Lane Hotel failed to win landmark status, so now it’s being demolished to make way for a 1,210 foot condo tower that no one will probably live in. [New York YIMBY]
• In related skyline-changing news, the massive, controversial One Vanderbilt office building has been approved near Grand Central. At 1,501 feet, it will dwarf even the new WTC, which technically has a parapet of “only” 1,368 feet. [The New York Times]
• Every Memorial Day weekend, thousands of music fans—from train-hopping crust punks to pond-hopping Black Metal fans from Scandinavia—descend on Baltimore for Maryland Deathfest, the largest “extreme music” festival in North America. This year, Brooklyn-based photographer Adel Souto documented the 100 best back patches at the festival. Many of them are better than most of the art we’ve seen in galleries recently. [No Echo]
• Jasper Johns’s nonprofit has opened an exhibition space near the new Whitney dedicated exclusively to artist-curated shows. [artnet News]
• It turns out that Marilyn Mosby, prosecutor in the trial of the police officers who killed Freddie Gray, was once a plaintiff on Judge Judy. Don’t worry, she won. [CBS Baltimore]
• Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the first time Baltimore has seen local celebrities take the stand in front of the Honorable Judith Sheindlin. [The Village Voice]
• Is there anything creepier than the notion that the song “Gloomy Sunday” set off a wave of suicides in post-WW1 Budapest? Yes. The “Smile Clubs” that were started to combat the epidemic are much, much creepier. Warning: the accompanying photos of taped-in-place smiles will likely haunt you for eternity. [io9]

Corinna: Colin Farrell walks into the victim’s house and finds that even the paintings are in disarray. There’s one abstraction (on his left), so you’re not expecting the victim to be a total sleazeball…not yet.
Michael: But even the abstraction looks like a reclining nude made grotesque! I read it as a mound of flesh on a fainting couch. That one on the right is just all-around awful.

Last night’s hotly anticipated debut of True Detective‘s second season on HBO was really confusing. Of course, fans of the show expect to have no idea what is going on with the series’ convoluted plots, but one scene in particular caught us off guard. Colin Farrell and company paid a visit to a supposed kidnapping victim’s house and found his collection of misogynistic contemporary art pretty disturbing. Ick. We did a little detective work of our own to find out more about the shudder-inducing curatorial preferences of (potential?) murder suspects. If you have any info on any of the artists featured here, let us know in the comments!

Michael: I was watching this with my family last night, and they literally all turned to me and asked me to interpret what the fuck is going on here. Turns out this piece is actually White Water, 1999, by Peter Sarkisian. It’s some kind of hologram/video loop of a tiny woman bathing. It’s less icky than having an actual, un-refrigerated bowl of milk laying around, but the thought of this hanging out on a coffee table still creeps me out.

Michael: At first, this slashed canvas looked like some hipstery album art/illustration.
Corinna: A nod to Romanticism, to show that the collector knows his art history?

Michael: But now it looks like it’s a variation on The Death of Ophelia where the subject is returning the viewer’s gaze. I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean, but it adds a classical allusion to the assortment of images implying the death or mutilation of female bodies.

Michael: Here’s a detail of the painting above the mantle, which gives us an idea of what Francis Bacon’s “Bed” paintings would look like if he strove for more naturalistic rendering.
Corinna: I am definitely predicting that there’s going to be many female victims (ick) in this season.

Corinna: Obligatory phallus statue.

Corinna: Scantily clad women!

Corinna: Uh, even more scantily clad women. I think we get the point—this guy is a perv.

Corinna: And yes, a Medieval/New Orleans-style skeleton statue to remind you, the viewer, that death lurks at every corner.

You might see this at Dirty Looks on Tuesday night.

This weekend, take some time for America. Go to the beach. Or a mountain. Or a cornfield or something. Eat gross food and watch fireworks. But before you do all that, get your cultural fill during the week. From Shakespeare on the Bowery, queer film screenings, a “virtual fashion show,” and two simultaneous exhibitions at 1329 Willoughby Avenue on Friday night—there are plenty of non-pyrotechnic activities leading up to the nation’s birthday.

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Tue

Bridget Donahue

99 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
7:00 p.m.Website

Mark von Schlegell and Sophie von Olfers present Hamlet

Fuck waiting in line all day trying to nab a ticket to Shakespeare in the Park when you can see Hamlet at Bridget Donahue’s gallery in the LES.

Wed

White Columns

320 West 13th St (Enter on Horatio St)
New York, New York 10014
8:00 p.m.Website

Dirty Looks: On Location 2015 Sam Ashby and Ginger Brooks Takahashi

Like a watching someone’s home video series set to a stonewashed acid soundtrack (maybe), Sam Ashby’s films made during the 2014 Fire Island Artist Residency will play with a live synth soundtrack by Ginger Brooks Takahashi.

$10 suggested donation

Garis & Hahn

263 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Website

Yale MFA Painting and Printmaking Graduates 2015

It’s a whole lot of painting by Yale’s graduating class. Catch these recent students here before you start seeing them in shows all over the LES in the fall.

Artists: Henry Chapman, Brandon Coley Cox, Katherine Davis, Maria De Los Angeles, Sarah Faux, Sean Fitzgerald, Marcela Florido, H. Friedman, Patrick Groth, Camille Hoffman, Fox Hysen, Marisa Manso, Johanna Povirk-Znoy, Luke Rogers, Tschabalala Self, Martha Tuttle, Sam Vernon, David Walsh, William Warden, Kyle Williams, and Luyi Xu

Higher Pictures

980 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Website

Photography Sees the Surface

This show gets a nod because curator Aspen Mays is a super-talented photographer (I once bid on her work at an auction in Chicago at Roots & Culture and I *almost* won it), so I’m down to see who she’s selected as choice photographers, both past and present.

Artists:  Ben Alper, Molly Brandt, Ellen Carey, Lynne Cohen, Linda Connor, AnnieLaurie Erickson, Ben Fain, Jackie Furtado, Nick George, Ann Hamilton, Peter Happel Christian, Whitney Hubbs, Lowey & Puiseux, Jessica Mallios, Man Ray, Casey McGonagle, Eileen Mueller, John Opera, Gina Osterloh, Justin James Reed, Meghann Riepenhoff, Melanie Schiff, Adam Schreiber, Frederick Sommer, Sonja Thomsen, Minor White, Jeff Whetstone, and Anonymous.

Thu

Fridman Gallery

287 Spring St
New York, New York 10013
7:30 p.m. Website

Stephen Vitiello, Leah Beeferman

Stephen Vitiello is so punk rock. So is Leah Beeferman. They released a 7” record together of atmospheric noise/sound on indie label Textual Records. A preview of what to expect from their performance on Thursday can be found here.

SIGNAL

260 Johnson Avenue
Brooklyn, New York 11206
8:00 p.m.Website

The Coven Magazine Issue No. 4 + PAOM Virtual Fashion Show

What the hey is a virtual fashion show? I sure hope it’s like this unofficial Barbie fashion show game…with a booming soundtrack! Anyway, celebrate the release of Coven with some art, zines, and DJs because it’s practically the holiday weekend.

Arts + Leisure

1571 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10029
7:00 - 10:00 p.m.Website

Jennifer Sullivan: House Cat

There will be kooky, pink cat paintings and broken piggy banks that look like chopped-off, manicured fingernails above a cat flap on a wooden door. For those who appreciate a bountiful, rhythmic application of color and materials—and, of course, for the cat lurvers.

Fri

Transmitter

1329 Willoughby Ave 2A
Brooklyn, NY
6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.Website

Closing Reception for Spooky Laughter at a Distance Transmitter

The artists in this show take a comical approach to “uncanny connectivity” or what Einstein referred to as “spooky action at distance.” There might be a lot of theory and quantum physics behind the curatorial intent here, but the work itself is pretty fun. Ben Pederson’s rainbow-hued mobiles connect various art-making strategies and seemingly random objects into psychedelic kitsch (in a good way). Jennifer Grimyser’s photographs are a bit like still lifes and a bit like flatbed scans of collages—indexing objects and images of objects in an impossibly collapsed field of depth. It’s harder to see how Todd Kelly’s saccharine-hued, cartoony paintings relate to theoretical physics, but there is something about them that is definitely spooky.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid

1329 Willoughby Ave
Brooklyn, NY
6.00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.Website

Made in USA / Some Parts Imported

In the same building at the same time, curators Naomi Reis with Heidi Lau bring together ten foreign-born artists who live and work in the United States. The show offers personal, identity-informed perspectives on issues like globalization and the value of labor. The exhibition features work by Nicole Awai, Jenny Cho, Ignacio González-Lang, Christopher K. Ho, Daisuke Kiyomiya, Heidi Lau, Esperanza Mayobre, Mónica Palma Narváez, Armita Raafat, and Arthur Simms.

The strange world of sunburn stock photography. Ow.

• How popular are different art businesses globally, according to Facebook likes? Apparently Americans like Christie’s more than Sotheby’s. [ARTnews]
• Don’t do “sunburn art”! (As if this were a “real” trend….) [Standard Daily]
• Australia’s art funding is facing “dark days” due to budget cuts. [The Guardian]
• Also facing a budget crisis: Chicago public schools. The city is cutting the schools’ budget by $200 million. [Marketplace]
• An insightful article on the former sources of performance art. The author wonders about some outsider sources as well, from Oofty Goofty, a feral man-beast covered in tar, to Mr. Eat It All, a guy who tried to eat a waterbed for a promotional event. [Glasstire]
• This is not surprising: art is really popular among the mega-wealthy. JJ Charlesworth talks about the rise of the prices in relation to the new global elite and the concept of scarcity as value. [artnet News]
• “Incredibly fast and easy loans against your artworks. 4% Monthly, No Fees. Money tomorrow.”​ The mega-wealthy can now receive low-interest loans from ArtRank by leveraging their art collection as collateral. [Observer]
• The Studio Museum in Harlem has just announced that David Adjaye is designing a $122 million new home for the institution. Unfortunately, it looks like this means the current building, which dates from 1914, will be joining the list of historic structures in Harlem that have been demolished in the past few years. [The New York Times]
• Horror fans and art-school students, rejoice! This Halloween, you’ll be able to feast your eyes on Art School of Horrors, a Roger Corman production, where “bad art wants revenge.” [IMDB]
• Baltimore has awesome bars and creative people—who actually want to be friends with you. [The New York Times]
• In China, the exhibition ban on Ai Weiwei has been lifted. The artist remains unable to travel outside the country. [The Art Newspaper]
• A piece of public art in Liverpool has been destroyed by vandals. The sculpture was a brass bird with electronics that played recordings of city residents talking about their hopes and dreams. Everyone’s a critic. [Liverpool Echo]
• Hello, bears! It’s bear-cam season. [Explore]

What you’ll see at P.P.O.W. this week.

This is one of those New York City weeks that gets off to a slow start and then builds up to a Friday night of frantically running around to see it all. It’s also one of those great weeks that reminds you the city is still full of people doing awesome, cheap projects with a DIY ethos. Wednesday night, the Lower East Side collective Con Artist is having a $20 art sale as a gesture to inject a little accessibility back into the art market. That night, Center for Architecture is hosting a discussion about artists appropriating the concerns, aesthetics, techniques, and materials of architects. That event is followed up by a sister exhibition at Andrea Meislin Gallery on Thursday night. From there, it’s thankfully only two blocks to Anthony Iacono’s opening at P.P.O.W.

Friday night won’t be as easy to coordinate. Continuing in the vein of democratic offerings, Hrag Vartanian is curating a yard sale in Greenpoint by the artist Jade Townsend. This is happening the same night as appropriation-friendly shows at James Fuentes and bitforms back in Manhattan. But the most DIY events of them all are the other direction on the L Train: Bushwick Art Book and Zine Fair and Latino Punk Fest are both having events a few blocks away from each other. Luckily, the yard sale and zine fest are going on all weekend, so don’t feel too bad if you have to miss one of the openings in your triage.

Finish out the weekend at Hester, where Andrea Crespo promises to offer us a glimpse of the future of subversion. Cyberpunk’s Not </>.

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Wed

Con Artist Ludlow Gallery

119 Ludlow St
New York, NY
7:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m.Website

The $20 Art Show

Con Artist is an art collective that’s been running shared studio and exhibition space in the Lower East Side since 2010. For this exhibition, they’ve taken inspiration from the Bread and Puppet Theater quote “Art is food! You can’t eat it, but it feeds you. Art has to be cheap and available to everybody.” This means you’ll be able to pick up works of art from collective members for the low, low price of $20. This is a welcome change from the recent headline-grabbing news of sales totaling more than the GDP of some Sub-Saharan nations. Our advice: get there early. At events like this, there’s usually a few diamonds in the rough that go fast.

Center for Architecture

536 Laguardia Place
New York, NY
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Panel Discussion and Reception: The Architectural Impulse

Alois Kronschlaeger, Jean Shin and Elise Ferguson will speak about the influence of architectural materials, processes, and concerns in the visual arts in a panel moderated by Jing Liu. It seems like many artists are somewhat obsessed with direct or stylistic references to the built environment—a trend that was especially noticeable when I (Michael) visited Boston last month.

This discussion is being followed by an exhibition curated by the architect Warren James at Cristin Tierney Gallery (540 West 28th Street) which opens the following night at the same time. The group show features work by Aziz + Cucher, Filip Dujardin, Elise Ferguson, Richard Galpin, Carmen Herrera, Barbara Kasten, Alois Kronschlaeger, Jennifer Marman + Daniel Borins, Jean Shin, Jorge Tacla, and Francisco Ugarte. This looks like a winner.

Thu

Andrea Meislin Gallery

534 W 24th St.
New York, NY
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Party Beuys: What Comes after Farce

Curator Daniel Bauer attempts to grapple with the weight of art history in a contemporary cultural landscape characterized by artifice and irony. It’s easy to imagine this show turning out to be a lot drab construction materials making tongue-in-cheek references, but the press release is beautiful: “These are the dressings we use to renovate the museum’s ruins which by now are composed more of conjectural Bondo than any single solid meta-narrative. Yet why not teach a history of art history in a Home Depot while we shop for our supplies?” Are there hints of optimism on the horizon of the discourse? That remains to be seen, but this looks like it’s going to be a smart show. The exhibition will include works by Ilit Azoulay, Ronnie Bass, Assaf Evron, East River School Painters, Lilly Hern-Fondation, Sarah Hewitt, Gareth James, Anthony Romero and Josh Rios, and Jeff Whetstone.

P.P.O.W.

535 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Anthony Iacono: Crudités at Sunset

P.P.O.W. has been on a roll. From Anton van Dalen’s impressively serious, though cartoon-y representations of East Village life to what looks like another showing of less-than straightforward, and eccentric presentations of identity, in all its guises, with Anthony Iacono’s solo exhibition. We’re given an image of a man (most likely) on all fours, with a potted plant hanging from one sagging nipple, and what look like purple breasts straddling a house vase with a lemon set in the corner. Curious to see more.

Fri

Auxiliary Projects

212 Norman Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
7:00 p.m. (Runs through the weekend)Website

Jade Townsend’s Crazy Amazing Garage Sale! Curated by Hrag Vartanian

What the heck is happening at this all-weekend garage sale? Watch the trailer, and you’ll see some patriotic spin resulting in a little girl handing her pennies over for a shard of art. What we think this means is that there’ll be an art garage sale, with really cheap art for you to buy. There’s also a lemonade stand, run by Jade Townsend and William Powhida. Wacky.

James Fuentes

55 Delancey Street
New York, NY
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.mWebsite

Conor Backman: Emiter

New paintings, sculptures, and wall-reliefs from Conor Backman, an artist who has a keen sense of traditional materials and how they can stand-in for how we experience screens and other forms of mediated experience in our digital age. If that sounds a little heady and vague for you, you can always go and enjoy his works for what they are: sleek and eye-catching. Plus, we’re told that some of the paintings will be of rose bushes. Flowers—pretty much everyone likes them.

bitforms

131 Allen Street
New York, NY
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Memory Burn

Get excited for an exhibition about death. Okay, it’s really an exhibition about “observ[ing]  mortality and death in relation to recording devices,” which is a topic we all deal with, artists and otherwise, with every new update to our software. In addition to the opening on July 10, bitforms will host an online exhibition along with gallery exhibition. The GIFs and videos that are already online look appealing, dealing with the affective loss through digital materials.

Daniel Canogar, exonemo, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Sara Ludy, Sarah Rothberg, Angela Washko, Andrea Wolf

Curated by Chris Romero

Signal

260 Johnson Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. (Runs through the weekend)Website

Bushwick Art Book and Zine Fair 2015 Preview and Reception

All the books and zines by Bushwick’s best and other up-and-comers. Totally chill, and relaxed, unlike an Armory-type fair, and less balls-to-the-walls with net bros than the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1. New this year: a selection of independent publications and zines from Detroit. For real, it’s always a fun event.

PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE: ART VANDELAY, Birds, LLC, Bodega, BOMB Magazine, Cinders, COCAINE, Endless Editions, Hassla, Christopher Kardambikis, Christina Kelly, Aidan Koch, Miniature Garden, Mixed Media, MOSSLESS Magazine, NURTUREart Non-Profit, Packet Biweekly, Papercut Press, Pau Wau Publications, Peradam, PrimaryInformation, Nikholis Planck, Publication Studio Hudson, Secretary Press, Slow Youth, Small Editions, Sorry Archive, Stranger Than Bushwick, Matthew Thurber, TOTEM, Ugly Duckling Presse, VUU Studio

Don Pedro

90 Manhattan Ave
Brooklyn, NY
7:30 p.m. Website

NYC Latino Punk Fest Benefit

Ok, this technically isn’t an art opening, but we’re including it for several reasons. First, it’s a short walk from Bushwick Art Book and Zine Fest, and it’s the perfect afterparty for that event (this starts at 7:30, but it will probably be going strong long after the Franzia has run dry at galleries). Second, Desidencia Subversiva is playing and they are legends from the Mexican underground scene in the 80s. Mostly, though, Latino Punk Fest is awesome and should be an inspiration to the whole creative community—it’s an entirely DIY festival put on with no sponsors, investors, or promoters. It’s truly a labor of love from a group of volunteers and their friends who donate time and resources to make something great on a shoestring budget (without selling out). The main festival happens in August, but get a taste of the DIY awesomeness tonight with music from Flykills, Ezcasos Recursos, Gun Culture, and, of course, Desidencia Subversiva.

Sun

Hester

55-59 Chrystie Street, Suite 203
New York, NY
6:00 p.m.Website

Andrea Crespo: polymorphoses

Andrea Crespo’s work reframes post-net art aesthetics with a feminist/queer perspective. Think cyborgs and avatars questioning the inherently arbitrary nature of their genders and identities. This solo exhibition at Hester was announced with a press release that’s just a link to a Vimeo file. There, text scrolls across a glitchy black background—recalling ICQ conversations or MS DOS—detailing the libidinal effects of a virus that could be of either the computer or organic variety. As the virus recodes its hosts, the narrative meanders into the poetic or ASCII images. I know we’re not supposed to use the term “cyberpunk as fuck” anymore, but damn.

• Nope, that’s not a still from “Blade Runner.” That’s just Beijing. [Gizmodo]
• I (Michael) have been off-and-on obsessed with cyberpunk over the years. People often tell me it’s no longer relevant. Claire L. Evans posits that cyberpunk lost its appeal (or at least its visibility) because we already live in the future presaged by its writers. But isn’t that part of the appeal? Nostalgia for a genre softens the harsh reality of living under global mega-corporations, city-gobbling biotech parks, inescapable advertising, international hacking intrigue, killer drones, and a surveillance state. Like, how many people in all-Underarmour outfits are ordering sex off a cracked iPad screen right now? [Motherboard]
• Or we could blame 1995 for killing cyberpunk. That year, no less than six mainstream movies attempted to exploit the craze—and according to one writer, they were all terrible. Personally, I think Strange Days was one of the decade’s best films, and super relevant given the state of sousveillance, police brutality, and our addiction to user-generated content. [Paste Magazine]
• Related: Here is a collection of the absolute worst hacking scenes in movies. [College Humor]
• Thank you, Google, for showing us that androids dream of psychedelic sheep. Someone fed the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas into the infamously trippy AI neural network and the results are pretty much what you’d expect. [YouTube]
• Reddit fired one of its administrators. In a show of solidarity, unpaid moderators went on strike, shutting down a sizeable chunk of the site’s boards. People are freaking out. Recode looks at the particular challenges and risks associated with attempting to manage a hive mind. [Re/code]
• Reddit “apologizes” to its users. [Reddit]
• PSA: Whenever you feel like your feed is full of shit, you can always rely on The Awl to make you feel better about the state of writing. It’s full of real writers, writing like real humans! And they cover real issues, like the WeWork revolution taking place in New York. [The Awl]
• Fundraising is now more important to museums than ever. Case in point: the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center “unexpectedly announced” that development director Veronica Kessenich would become executive director of the institution. [Burnaway]
• The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive has finally announced an opening date for its new building: January 31, 2015. The opening has been pushed back due to a number of California-specific concerns, like earthquakes. [The Daily Californian]
• Uh, for real, is ISIS selling looted antiquities on Whatsapp? Just a little bit. (My thoughts on ISIS and looting, here.) [Bloomberg Business]
• Ming Wong is a queer Singaporean artist who unites sci-fi and drag for performances in Shanghai. Can we be friends? [The Beijinger]
• Eric Edwards has collected $10 million worth of African Art. Until now, the 1,600-piece collection has only been on view in his apartment. He’s hoping to open a museum in Bed-Stuy. [Gothamist]
• How bad is this outdoor sculpture of Nefertiti? So bad that Egyptians are offended. The replica is now being removed. [BBC News]

At Company Gallery, a prone crash dummy serves as the centerpiece. Are those watering cans ascending the stairs to look out the window or commit mass-suicide?

Michael: It’s always a surprise to see a group show, think you “get it,” and then read the curator’s statement and realize you’re totally off. That was my experience of almost everything we saw. That’s rewarding in its own way, though. And it gives me optimism that there are artists and curators veering away from the obvious, overly referential, and aesthetically homogeneous. So much of the work up in the LES right now has little in common from a stylistic or material perspective—leaving the viewer to make connections based largely on emotional impact. The fact that we all drew such different conclusions about the work might point to some unspoken, subconscious zeitgeists of concerns, desires, or points of reference. Looking for those is—in part—our jobs. So it’s nice when group shows are a little opaque.

Corinna: Feelings. So many feels were on display in the art on this LES trip. And I don’t know what to do with all of those feels in this humid swamp of a New York City July, when emotions only involve evading the sweatland. The most common emotion is “I have evolved into a fish. Must throw myself into the ocean.” But at Soft Core, I saw work that, while, yes, opaque, I wanted to see more. Adam Parker Smith is always a chameleon, and I never know what he’ll make, although it’s usually very tactile, and made to be looked at more than once. Close to the Skin, a show similarly bringing about feelings from non-human objects, hit the mark when the works were erotic. Otherwise, the relationship to these objects was…well, I don’t know. I do think there’s an urgency in art now to explore how non-human objects (whether technological or organic) can act on their own, without our intervention. And for that, these shows both took my interest.

Soft Core
Artists: Josh Blackwell, Anne Doran, Andrew Guenther, Dave Hardy, Karen Heagle, Christian Holstad, Stephen Irwin, Linder, William J. O’Brien, Suzannah Sinclair, Adam Parker Smith, Naomi Uman, Pinar Yolacan, and Jade Yumang
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS
89 Eldridge Street
New York, NY 10002
Summer hours: Wednesday through Saturday, 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Michael: The show is loosely organized around the idea of soft-core pornography or things that are literally “soft.” I’m more interested in the unstated references to prehistoric aesthetics and their relation here to somewhat base impulses: play, drawing a dick, making a mess, et cetera…There seems to be a lot of interest in primitivism and the libertine, but those are such loaded topics I can understand an aversion to addressing them head-on.

William J. O’Brien, “Untitled,” (felt on felt)

Michael: I love this. It reminds me of the paper cut-outs Matisse (patron saint of Primitivism) made later in life, but it’s full of cartoon-y boners and text like “SCUM” and “PISS” like a back patch you’d see on St. Marks. Felt also has that dual association with the primal and crafting supplies. I like how decor-friendly the piece is too. I could totally see this subversively slipping into some interior-decorator-designed condo or hotel lobby until someone actually looked at it.

Corinna:  Right. Those details would surely be missed by most hotel-goers. It’s so soft, and such a jumble when you see it, though. There’s no depth, so it reminded me of a quilt. I don’t know if that’s a failure: I see the messiness of the work as being a “fuck you” to primitivism, to craft, by overloading it with images to the point of unreadability—except for the actual words, like “garbage,” “piss,” and “fucking.”

Adam Parker Smith, “Herd,” 2015.

Michael: This is one of my favs of the day. It’s like a cave drawing on a plushy cut pile rug—seemingly drawn with the artist’s fingers. Of course, cave paintings have lasted millennia, but this would disappear if you vacuumed it. It reminded me of playing on the floor as a child. Mostly, I wanted to run my hands through it.

Corinna: Yeah, I loved how temporary it seemed, and plush. I wanted it, but only to know that I can’t have it.

Pinar Yolacan, “Untitled,” 2001. From the “Like a Stone” series.

Corinna: What is with all these references? I guess it’s better than the all-Greek phase we had around the time of VVORK? But there’s still that hyperlink/Photoshop blue in the background, “grounding” us in the present.

Michael: Again, I saw a Paleolithic art history reference here. I first thought this was a painting of a statuette like the Venus of Willendorf, but up-close it’s revealed that it’s a photo of a model in white body paint. I love that. I was confused as to why the head was cropped at first (a big no-no in the politics of representing female nudes) but that absence of face is totally necessary for the illusion to succeed. It’s not objectifying the model—it’s about referencing an iconic archetype that’s present in dozens of cultures’ old-school art history.

Corinna: Whoa. No idea that was a model.

Dave Hardy, [not yet titled], 2015.

Michael: I’m not too crazy about this. In the context of the other work, it does read like an archetypal column/spire/obelisk/monument to the child-like impulse to build a blanket fort. But mostly, I’ve just seen so much stacked stuff recently, so I’m a little bored. Why are sculptors so into Jenga lately? If its a monument to anything, it’s the artist’s balancing skills. I do like that chrome chair though.

Close to the Skin
Artists: Talia Chetrit, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Elizabeth Jaeger, Life After Life (Karthik Pandian and Paige K. Johnston), and Willa Nasatir
Curated by Lumi Tan
Company Gallery
88 Eldridge Street, 5th Floor
New York, New York 10002
Summer hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 12:00 – 6:00 p.m.

Michael: This show threw me for a loop. Based on the title, and the anthropomorphic qualities of some of the work, I assumed it was about representing surrogate experiences of the body—from a sad-looking painting in a cage to weird watering can/flower vase figures leaning up a staircase toward the window. I found myself reading the “body language” of inanimate objects and empathizing. Perhaps that has to do with the sensibilities of Lumi Tan, who curates at The Kitchen, a performance-centric art space. What was the actual theme? “The subjectivity of smelling” or something?

Corinna: I ended up marking up the press release because I was trying to find the theme. Which isn’t so much about smelling—although that’s definitely in the PR—as much as, my favorite sentence that hints at what the exhibition is about: “Winking emoticons and a jokey affect ease the embarrassment of sharing personal opinions on the abject, the sexual, and the moments where our own bodies become overtly natural.” It’s about what’s too personal, and those hard to share “too personal” moments. But for me, the show was about human and non-human relations. But that shattered body on the floor was too literal—did not do it for me.

Life After Life (Karthik Panadian and Paige K. Johnston), ?

Michael: This is a weird one… I think I like it. My gut reaction was to feel bad for the dog, which is odd because I probably wouldn’t give that painting a second glance if it were in a frame rather than a cage.

Corinna: The painting reminds me of what Camille Henrot does with her line work, often focused on animals. I’m going to put myself out there and say that it’s sad that the dog is caged in, but I doubt that’s a worse proposition than being put up on a wall. My one issue with the work is that darn vase. It’s like you put a vase on it so that it’s art.

Michael: But I like the vase as a strategy for grounding this in the realm of sculpture. Otherwise, it’s a painting framed in a cage. It’s gimmicky, sure, but it seems like an invitation to interact with the work (even though I know you’re not supposed to literally). Like, this is a thing that can be picked up and used—it exists outside the realm of representation. And I think that makes the whole piece seem more “real.”

small Marie-Ange Guilleminot

Michael: This is a video of a figure manipulating a shapeless sack, installed on a small monitor. At the point in the loop that we walked in, it looked so much like a scrotum being violently massaged. Then it goes through a progression of forms that read like udders being milked or bread being kneaded. I almost wish it didn’t have sound—you can hear that it’s a beanbag or filled with plastic beads. I liked the ambiguity of the material before I picked up on that.

Corinna: I loved this video. Marie-Ange Guilleminot made “dolls” and in this video her care for them borders on the erotic: I thought she might have been masturbating with them. If you care for an object, if you love it, it’s sometimes an erotic relationship. She goes there. I’m also reminded of the early work of Annette Messager, who dressed up her “boarders,” these dead, taxidermied birds who she knitted colorful sweaters for, and wrote detailed stories about them, too. (When I first saw these birds in sweaters, on a projection screen in an art history class, they looked like ice cream cones.)

Here’s some examples of Guilleminot’s “dolls,” below, just for reference.

Examples of Guilleminot’s “dolls”

Another Guilleminot doll. This one looks like a two-sided condom, or a toeless sock.

The ever-changing storefront that is the entrance to Regina Rex.

Michael: In part two of our LES outing, things are a little more fun. Regina Rex is showing translucent threads of dawn, Conrad Ventur’s photos of the late Mario Montez, the Puerto-Rican drag queen who became a Warhol superstar and then disappeared from public life for 30 years, living out their own version of glamour in Florida. Appropriately—if your favorite association with Latino drag queens in Florida is a certain Robin Williams movie set in South Beach—each photo is paired with a “Birdcage” by Elisabeth Kley. Up at 247365, there’s a group show, There is no Fact of the Matter as to Whether or Not P, that’s a little more heady and less outwardly fun, but approaches readymade/appropriation with a somewhat playful sensibility.

Corinna: So glad I wasn’t the only one who picked up on the oddity of the “birdcage” association with the drag queen bit. It does give these portraits—of someone at a grandparent’s age—a sense of absurd fragility, given their pairing with bright, Miami-colored sculptures by Elisabeth Kley that, while stable at a distance, are falling apart upon close inspection. (In the words of Cher in Clueless, these are Monets: “From far away, it’s OK, but up close, it’s a big old mess.”) But for real, I love Regina Rex’s new space so much, especially its rotation of signage that’s always a clutter of messages amid a clutter of messages.

247365 has a group show up that’s more playful than what’s on at Regina Rex, but has its witty moments.

translucent threads of dawn
Artists: Elisabeth Kley and Conrad Ventur
Regina Rex ​
221 Madison St.
New York, NY 10002

From left to right: Conrad Ventur, “MM #28,” 2012; “Elisabeth Kley Gold Birdcage with Triangles,” 2015

Michael: Out of everything up in the LES right now, this show is my absolute favorite. I wanted to bring a sleeping bag and live in this gallery—which is saying a lot because it’s such an awkward space. The work here is magical. Conrad Ventur’s photographs work so well with Kley’s birdcages on so many levels. They have this sort of tropical escapist quality to them; channeling midcentury glamour and the construction of then-newly-accessible “resort culture.” Like, when travel for pleasure became a middle-class possibility, but with its reference point still the glitz of old Hollywood. They feel aspirational. Here, Montez and Ventur queer that image of glamour, calling out the artifice while proposing that it’s accessible even more so via appropriation. But at the same time, they’re vulnerable and seem to be eulogizing an era that’s end(ing/ed). Kley’s ceramics are brittle and frail—several of them seemed to be already cracking—and Mario Montez passed away shortly after these photos were taken.

Corinna: I’ve seen these photos before—Paddy wrote about seeing them at Untitled, too—and there’s a way to too easily fetishize the person, Mario Montez, that comes across during a solo show. Pairing Kley’s works with Ventur’s photographs was a bold move; Max Warsh of Regina Rex mentioned that it was Kley who initially suggested the pairing. That’s the type of right-on decision-making you can still get from an artist-run gallery, which Regina Rex is.

Up close with one of Kley’s birdcages. You can see the joints aren’t quite solid.

There is no Fact of the Matter as to Whether or Not P
Artists: Zach Bruder, Sam Ekwurtzel, Sofia Leiby, Anne Libby
247365
57 Stanton Street
New York, NY 10002
Summer hours: Tuesday through Friday, 12:00 – 6:00 p.m.

Corinna: 247365 excels at work that’s sometimes absolutely silly, but that for some reason, I usually want to live with. Maybe that has something to do with the materials used; often there’s a domestic appeal, even in cases where there’s terror at hand.

Michael: It’s funny—I had (unrelatedly) just been thinking about how the concerns of a lot of recent sculpture and painting have inverted, in some ways. So much contemporary painting has to do with means of production more so than image-making, while sculptors have become consumers—collaging readymade objects that have semiotic significance, like an image. I think this has something to do with late capitalism and alienation from manufacturing, I dunno. I’ll figure that out later, but this show kind of hit the nail on the head. Or rather, purchased a nail and then silk-screened the instructional diagram for how to hit it on the head onto a surface. (Corinna: Oooohhhh. Damn. Wish I’d thought of that.)

Anne Libby, “Force Divided By Area” (Putty III), 2015

Corinna: For terror, there’s Anne Libby’s “gate” at the gallery entrance. It looks like a folding table has been sliced into meticulously baroque sections: think Damien Hirst’s sliced animals. More or less, I couldn’t help but think this could be an expandable prop for some doom-and-gloom Dungeon Land. Not too sure how I feel about this work individually, other than, perhaps, a strong use of material play. You have to look at it from front to back to see the Gate of Terror.

Michael: This was my favorite piece in the show. The artist cut away all the molded plastic around the metal supports for a cheap plastic table, revealing the engineering logic behind the otherwise unimpressive design. The result of that physics-based thinking is surprisingly Gothic. It made me think of Joseph Stella’s painting of the Brooklyn Bridge or other artists who marveled at engineering feats in the era when The Machine Age was a source of wonder rather than dread.

Sam Ekwurtzel

Corinna: This is a metal detector with a duck-rabbit attached to the head. It took us a while to figure out whether it was a duck or a rabbit. The joke never gets old. Thanks, Wittgenstein!

Beyond the visual play of the duck-rabbit, it’s a pretty apt figure to be part of Ekwurtzel’s assemblage: it is what you see it is.

Michael: Didn’t people used to put animal heads on canes? When did the prosthetic lose its flair for the dramatic? One of my favorite details in this is that the brand of the metal detector is “Lobo.” Technological wolves don’t hunt electric sheep, apparently. They prefer metal fowl. Or rabbits, depending which direction you photograph it from.

Corinna: And don’t forget duck-headed umbrellas.

Sofia Leiby, “Hard Lines,” 2015. Image courtesy of 247365.

Corinna: I’ll admit that Sofia Leiby’s paintings are difficult to get into. Literally, they’re difficult to read, with fragments of text and images that have the feeling of hieroglyphs, perhaps in the way that some Cy Twombly loopy marks appear. The marks slip and slide from presence (the deepest yellows) to impermanence (the yellow dust). Like most of the rest of the works in this show, there’s a simple pleasure in looking at this painting as an object, and figuring out its materials. (Leiby’s panel is made up of chalk pastel and silkscreen ink on masonite.)

There’s an interview between Sofia Leiby and Jaakko Pallasvuo on Rhizome that entertains an idea concerning Leiby’s practice, and that explains what she’s doing, as someone trying to find authenticity in painting by getting rid of the self, and yearning for one of those all-encompassing obsessions, like she felt as a teen with Lord of the Rings.

Can we feel as obsessed about our practice, as we did, say as teens desiring to know everything punk, AbEx, Star Trek, whatever it was? It’s just not new any longer, once we figure out all the codes. Gotta find other things to sustain us, beyond the Teen Punk Utopia of dumpster diving forever.

Michael: Yeah, I read this as an admission that the act of mark-making has lost its appeal. Again, back to brush-less painting: Leiby harvests evidence of mark-making from other sources and silkscreens it onto chalkboard—the most didactic of surfaces. It’s probably what Warhol should’ve done when seeing Basquiat’s work made him fall back in love with painterly painting, rather than those lame three-way circle-jerk canvasses they made with Francesco Clemente.

Zach Bruder, “Give You More Gold,” 2015.

Corinna: Hard not to like a smiling lemon!

Michael: Yeah! this is the one Zach Bruder I liked the most. These all feel like logos…and given the spirit of the other work in the show I’m just going to assume they are. This has a little more zest to it (no pun intended, for once) and doesn’t seem so cold and calculated, even though the process behind its creation probably was. Whatever. I don’t know what I’m being sold anymore, but I’ll take it!

• Dutch designers Viktor & Rolf wrapped models in dresses that look like broken paintings at Paris Couture Week. Will painting always return to the “hot chicks on canvas” genre? These are really stupid. One redeeming quality: they remind me of that time Krystle fought Alexis in her painting studio on Dynasty.  [Dezeen]
• Ain’t no drama like Nicolas Bourriaud drama. The famed writer/curator was recently fired from his position at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts by French Minister of Culture  Fleur Pellerin. Apparently the scandal involves a sordid extramarital affair! Talk about ministering to French culture! Amirite? Since then, there’s been a media outcry with accusations of nepotism, petitions, and sassy exchanges in the press. [artnet News]
• In an epic story that spans the majority of the past century: how the Leslie + Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art  became the world’s first gay art museum. [Smithsonian]
• Apparently job growth in the “creative sector” has outpaced New York City’s traditional economic engines of finance and real estate. Over the past decade, jobs in the visual arts alone grew 24 percent. So, uh, how about an increase in wages? When cost of living is factored in, New York’s cultural workers are actually earning significantly less than their peers nationally. [Hyperallergic]
• Is this in poor taste? It’s difficult to make me (Michael) groan, but it was hard to watch this unaired Saturday Night Live skit tackling the awkwardness of normalcy given the current state of race relations in America. [NBC]
• Good news: President Obama has designated a swath of the Nevada desert as a “Protected Landscape.” The area includes sculptor Michael Heizer’s famed, gorgeous “City” which will now be spared from future development encroaching on the desert. [Review Journal]
•  Congratulations to Gary Carrion-Murayari of the New Museum and Alex Gartenfeld of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, who will curate the New Museum’s 2018 Triennial. [New Museum]
• Tracing artist Jon Rafman’s work from his earlier, self-proclaimed romantic work, like “9 Eyes” and “Kool-Aid Man in Second Life,” to his current interest in the internet’s marginal communities. [Momus]
• Ever lament the lack of criticism on the Internet? Well, Bookforum hands out daily reviews, y’all. Complain no more. [Bookforum]
• Public Art Fund is hiring an associate curator. Jump on that application, you up-and-comers! [Public Art Fund]
• Diva! Patti Lupone snatched a phone out of a texting audience member’s hand during a Broadway performance, all while never breaking character. [The Guardian]

Pore-free skin, of the kind you might see at Egress on Monday night.

Freaky fairy tales. Digital misfits. Pore-free faces. In a society on the move towards being post-kale, there’s something to be said about trying to find sincerity in all the digital fakery out there, but making it our own. That’s what we’re pretty sure we’ll see in this week’s round-up of art openings, from Egress at K. (Monday) to the #BHQFUOS artists in residence at the Bruce High Quality Foundation University Open Studios (Friday).

1. M
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Tue

Japan Society

333 East 47th Street
New York, NY 10017
Pieta in the Toilet: 9:00 p.m. Website

Japan Cuts 2015 (Runs through July 19, 2015)

There’s a ton of new Japanese flicks to check out in the final week of the festival, but from an art perspective, we recommend “Pieta in the Toilet.” A loner artist, and failed painter, might be dying but can’t bring himself to tell his family. Cue the tiny violins, the tears, and family heartbreak.

 

Wed

Lyles & King

106 Forsyth Street
New York, New York 10002
6:00 - 8:00 p.m. Website

Dan Ivic: Guts (2012 - 2015)

First off, Lyles & King is a very new, very fresh gallery in the Lower East Side. Go to the opening just for that, or you can go to see something you probably know very, very little about from dealers Isaac Lyles and Alexandra Lyles-King. For the gallery’s second exhibition, artist-turned-dealer-now-artist-again Dan Ivic (who we cannot find much information on, so he might be a ghost artist, or that lack of a trail could be related to him going by the name Kineko).

Thu

Backdrop

87 4th Avenue
Brooklyn, New York 11217
6:00 - 10:00 p.m.Website

Molly Rhinestones and Walker Sydell: #attentiongoth

Kids these days are obsessed with curating their constructed identities. From nightlife to social media, the aspiration of demi-celebrity seems to be an all-too-serious preoccupation. Then again, it’s always been a concern of New York’s twenty-somethings. Now, everyone’s publishing their own “Page Six,” 140 characters or less at a time. Sydell plunges headfirst into that pursuit with an ambiguously sincere/ironic conviction that’s not always clear as a straightforward critique. Molly Rhinestones has a performative/craft/garment practice that has involved everything from collaborations with AFC favorite Jaimie Warren’s Whoop-Dee-Doo to a career as a nightlife personality. In both her costuming and figurative sculpture here, however, there’s an optimistic vulnerability that outshines any cynical associations one might have with the cult of celebrity. Rhinestones approaches gendered childhood fantasies—from fairytales to Disney princesses—and enacts them with a deadpan wit and serious (albeit hot-glue-loaded) craftsmanship. Her elevation of craft store kitsch and decidedly un-glamorous, democratic materials like foamcore and cardboard to semi-precious realizations of girlhood aspirations is strangely uplifting. Like a fairytale ending, the heroine seems to be saying “Dreams can come true,” “I won’t grow up,” and almost certainly, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere”…out of styrofoam, tempera, and glitter.

Koenig & Clinton

459 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011
6:00 - 8:00 p.m.

Organic Situation

From artisanal kale-infused soap to ecotourism and the pastoral-romantic gaze, “authenticity” seems to be the hottest commodity right now. But how do we come to terms with the seemingly fruitlessness of that desire when almost every experience is mediated within some construct? The chance encounter, found object, or photograph of a serendipitous composition are frequently pre-considered, not the result of “organic” occurrences. In Peter Scott’s High Line Billboard, we see a tourist snapping a photo back at the artist. It’s an apt abstract for the concerns of the artists in this show—the photo op, the canned experience, and the framed natural or urban experience are what we’re often left to work with.

Artists: Tyler Coburn, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Peter Dreher, Denise Kupferschmidt, Zoe Ghertner, A.L. Steiner + robbinschilds, Geoffrey Hendricks, Miljohn Ruperto, Margaret Honda, Peter Scott, Kelly Jazvac, and Jonathan Bruce Williams

Fri

34 Avenue A, third floor

6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Website

#BHQFUOS Artist-in-Residency Open Studios

The Bruce residents this year are like an Annie’s orphanage of net-art misfits. And there ain’t nothing wrong with that in our digital age.

Artist Nandi Loaf has a DeviantArt profile. Orlando Estrada dances to Madonna in front of a fake-ass cartoon beach in his “Paradise Island” series. Artist Ariel Jackson sometimes goes by the name “Confuserella,” a Panfrikan space traveller, and projects her performances on all types of soft sculpture.

Dude, all this sounds better, and more honest, than whatever reified commodity you were planning on seeing in Chelsea this week.

Signal

260 Johnson Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
7:00 - 10:00 p.m. Website

SURFACE SUPPORT

There’s not much information from curator Amanda Schmitt about this group show, but it caught our eye. The artists involved are known for playing with the tension or dissonance between images and the objects that they represent or are. Lea Cetera’s installations involve projections interacting with real-world sculptures. Luca Dellaverson is known for assemblages that read like paintings but often comprise broken mirrors, resin, and sculptural elements. This looks like it has potential to be a good show. And we trust Signal.

Artists: Meriem Bennani, Antoine Catala, Lea Cetera, Luca Dellaverson, Dan Herschlein, Jessie Stead, Will Stewart, Philip Vanderhyden, and Kyle Williams

Sat

Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery

29 O’Callaghan Lane
Red Hook, New York 12571
1:00 - 4:00 p.m. Website

MFA Thesis Exhibition 2015

Get out of town. The Bard MFA show opens this Saturday in Red Hook (no, not Brooklyn). The low-residency program isn’t media specific, so you’ll see a little bit of everything under the upstate New York midday sun. (P.S. And you may as well visit the other galleries, like Retrospective, that have been burrowing upstate for awhile now.)

How to get there:

Take a train! To the Rhinecliff Amtrak station. (From the Bard website: for shuttle reservations from Rhinecliff Amtrak station, call: 845-758-7481.)

Drive! Parking is available in the lot at 7401 South Broadway and on Garden Street.

Artists: Genji Amino (writing), Gill Arno (music/sound), Daisy Atterbury (writing), Ian Burnley (film/video), Theo Darst (film/video), Taryn Haydostian (photography), Benjamin Heyer (photography), Laurie Kang (photography), Shambhavi Kaul (film/video), James Kelly (music/sound), Theodore Kennedy (film/video), Zak Kitnick (sculpture), Bernd Klug (music/sound), Natalie Labriola (sculpture), Cecilia Lopez (music/sound), Nora Mapp (writing), Felipe Meres (photography), David Roesing (painting), Matthew Sepielli (painting), Barb Smith (sculpture), Krista Belle Stewart (photography), Ezra Tessler (painting), Kyle Thurman (painting), Johanna Tiedtke (painting), Wilder Alison (painting), Nathan Young (music/sound), Kyle Zynda (sculpture)

• From art-school hip-hop acts to testicle-nailing performance artists: a brief survey of what’s being censored in Putin’s Russia. [Newsweek]
• London collectors Eskandar and Fatima Maleki have settled their suit against dealer/curator Amir Shariat. The couple, who made a fortune in the oil industry and sit on the board of the Tate, alleged that Shariat was profiting from their art transactions without their knowledge. There aren’t any details about how exactly he was making money, but isn’t that what dealers are supposed to do? [The Telegraph]
• In Berlin, Der Spiegel contributor Ulrike Knöfel lists off a ton of problems with the city’s museums: they’re boring, ugly, and uninspiring, leaving them with low visitor numbers. Knöfel locates a “dearth of blockbusters,” which would up the visitor numbers. Whatever happened to quality? [Der Spiegel
• Online archivists in the arts may want to keep an eye on Iceland. The Reykjavík Art Museum’s website now features information on the roughly 1,000 exhibitions held since 1973. That’s a big, important undertaking. [Iceland Review]
• Curators are not happy with the Louvre’s plan to construct a massive new storage facility for the museum’s collection. The scheme involves transporting hundreds of thousands of artworks to a small town 200 kilometers south of Paris. This site is several hours from the capital and will make research, loans for exhibitions, and display rotations a logistical nightmare. [The Art Newspaper]
• If you’re curious about the how art forgers and thieves get away with their crimes, the New Inquiry editor Malcolm Harris has interviewed someone in the art-crime industry who has witty, British answers to all of Harris’s questions. You will learn a lot, like that it’s surprising that forgers get away with anything. “Han van Meegeren’s Vermeers don’t look anything like Vermeers, but they managed to fool people. It is always the accompanying story, the invented provenance — which is essentially a confidence trick that manages to pass off the object — that really tricks the buyer.” [The New Inquiry]
• People of the Internet, pls submit to Internet Yami-Ichi, a one-day “Internet black market.” Artists, galleries, and normal people are all hosting booths to sell their wares—like at ye olde general store or at an intergalactic trading hub like Mos Eisley—still accepting submissions for booth ideas. All ya gotta do is follow these rules: 1) Sell things related to the Internet; 2) No dangerous, harmful, or illegal goods, please! This black market wants to remain free and useful. [Internet Yami-Ichi]
• Here’s one more article about how New York is unaffordable for artists. This piece stands out for mentioning some strategies artists and organizations are taking to mitigate the crisis. Had anyone else never heard of SPARC (Seniors Partnering with Artists Citywide) before? The program gives artists a stipend and workspace in the city’s senior centers in exchange for providing programing and classes for the elderly. [Next City]
• Drinking eight glasses of water is a myth! [Spectator]
• Is spam “dying out”? Not really, but for the first time in twelve years, less than 50 percent of all email is spam. [Motherboard]

• Paul Mason makes a convincing argument that we’re quietly teetering on the cusp of “postcapitalism.” Markets have failed, the correlation between labor and wages is shaky, and economies based on information make no sense financially; there’s no scarcity of knowledge and it’s human nature to share (rather than monetize) it. [The Guardian]
• Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and many other non-insane people think weaponized AI is a terrible idea. Can’t we all agree to just let the bots do what they love: making weird pictures with dog faces, spamming the comments section of blogs, and posing for “sexy” videos at Japanese convention centers that creep everyone out on YouTube? [TIME]
• There goes the neighborhood: Jeff Koons bought up 50,200 square feet of West 52nd Street. It looks like he’s creating a massive new Hell’s Kitchen studio after being ousted by his former Chelsea landlord. [Realty Today]
• The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is asking Makoto Aida to change or remove his latest piece. The museum planned a summer exhibition aimed at children and (for some reason) invited the notoriously controversial artist to contribute work. His submission, a collaboration with his wife and teenage son, is a political rant aimed at the education system. [The Japan Times]
• Look! It’s a bathtub-headed sim. [Daniel Rourke]
• Artist and writer Sara Clugage writes about her near-spiritual obsession with Britney Spears, both as a teen and as an artist. At one time, Clugage writes, Spears was pretty much a celebrity cipher: “I saw that emptiness in Britney Spears, too. Given an icon without meaning, we pour in our own souls, making gods in our own image. I saw a writhing mass of contradictions: a visual promiscuity but a verbal purity, a public persona but an unknown person, a Hollywood starlet but a Louisiana girl. I imagined her as a saint, one of the highly sexualized Catholic ones with a baroque mixture of pain, ecstasy, and physicality.” [Pelican Bomb]
• The Church of Satan has unveiled its giant Baphomet statue during a massive ceremony on the banks of the Detroit River. Of course, Christians showed up to protest. The sculpture is itself an act of protest against displays of Christian symbols on government property. It is also so much cooler than any of the other lame religious art that’s been hanging out on red state capital buildings and courthouses. [International Business Times]
•  The Seattle Art Fair is luring out some big-name gallerists. Are galleries like Gagosian going after the Pacific Northwest’s tech-industry new money? Here’s a handy little guide to art collecting aimed at techie collectors. Bitcoin is not recommended. [artnet News]
•  Hey, photography curators, apply for this two-year curatorial fellowship at the Michener Museum in Pennsylvania. The fellow will be salaried and receive benefits. [Michener Museum]

• There’s a new investment firm that allows clients to purchase shares in an art collection “at a fraction of the cost” of actually buying art. The minimum investment? $10,000. Here’s our free advice: if you want to “invest” $10,000 in art, spend it buying a dozen works from emerging artists. [Small Business News]
• This incredibly sexist but still kind-of-adorably-local-news article out of Utah has a headline straight out of the Onion: “Pinterest says nude photos could be considered art; mom disagrees.” [KSL]
  International Sailor Moon Day is coming to New York on August 15. [Facebook]
• The best explanation of the ARTnews/Art in America merger comes from—no surprise—Julia Halperin at The Art Newspaper. She’s one of the few who’s recognized that Peter Brant may come out as the real winner. [The Art Newspaper]
• Investigative journalism performs at its best when it looks at a commonplace situation, then digs really hard at the surface, finding out its problems. Here, that problem involves quaaludes, McDonald’s, and a lenient bathroom policy. [The New York Times]
• Follow the #hillaryinnh (Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire) for plenty of feminist shrugging. Like this one, that praises her for being not just a mother, but also a daughter and a grandmother. Did I just say feminist shrugging? I meant feminist ugggh-ing. [Twitter]
• Robert Wilson looks back on performance art’s early days as a fringe medium to its emergence as a major component of the contemporary art canon. [The Observer]
• Many universities have art collections that date back from their early days. But what do they do with them? ” Are they like the contents of an upmarket car boot sale, an irrelevant, even embarrassing inheritance that many universities don’t quite know how to handle?” [Times Higher Education]
• Michael Jackson’s sequined white glove goes up to auction. If you have 20k, jump on it! [The Guardian]
• RoboCup 2015 just ended. Here’s some highlights of little robots playing soccer. [International Business Times]
• Take it from Christian Viveros-Faune: art can be stupid. Not to mention, his closing line in this review is near-perfect. [The Village Voice]

Jaimie Warren, “Self-portrait as Pennywise the Clown with the Blob, Jason, Freddy, Chucky, Leprechaun and Basketcase in re-creation of the Nativity scene from the Vyššì Brod Altarpiece (1350),” 2014

We have entered the sticky doldrums of New York in August. But although plenty of galleries are taking it slow this month, artists and institutions are creatively adapting their practices to beloved Summer pastimes—from a cookout at the Abrons Arts Center tomorrow to a nice, refreshing dip (in a mud pit) at The Palms Friday night. But if air conditioning is your thing, head to a cool, dark movie theater on Wednesday night for video art from the likes of Petra Cortright and Fake Injury Party. Unlike most CGI-filled Summer blockbusters, this is a benefit for the Bruce High Quality Foundation University. If all this weeknight relaxation has you ready to head back to the world of galleries by the time the weekend rolls around, check out solo shows from Joshua Caleb Weibley at Transfer and perpetual AFC favorite Jaimie Warren at American Medium. Stay hydrated, New York.

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Tue

Abrons Art Center

466 Grand Street
New York, NY 10002
7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. Website

HOT MEET: Beverly's NYC

HOT MEET continues! The series of cook-outs (don’t worry, they’re veg-friendly too) invites participants to informally chat with invited artists over barbecue and drinks in the Abrons Arts Center’s backyard. Past MEETs have brought art fans face-to-face and plate-to-plate with Jaimie Warren and Erin Markey. Tomorrow, the team behind Beverly’s NYC is partnering to bring free papusas and something called a spiked tropical punch along with a huge group of artists. Beverly’s is great. It’s either a bar that doubles as an art gallery or an art gallery that doubles as a bar—its neon-lit Essex Street digs kind of look like one big, super-trendy installation with rotating curatorial content. Tomorrow, Beverly’s is bringing a big contingent of artists to Abrons: RJ Supa, Stina Puotinen, Alison Kuo, Stephen McClintock, Kubi Nnamdie, Lee Vanderpool, Dan Conway, Andrea McGinty, Katherine Aungier, Colin Tom, Dani Zorzy, and Steve Myketian.

Wed

Silent Barn

603 Bushwick Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11206
7:00 p.m. Website

Another Protest Song: Karaoke With a Message

Consider this your activist pep rally. Sing loud and proud at a night of protest karaoke, organized by the Interference Archive. Anything from Public Enemy to Bob Dylan can be game. Don’t have a go-to protest song yet? Here’s a list of possibilities.

Nitehawk Cinema

136 Metropolitan Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11249
7:30 p.m. Website

The Future Is Whatever

Want to know what the next wave of video art will look like? It’s already landed. Attend this screening with over a dozen videos from emerging and semi-established artists. Proceeds from this screening ($15 per person) will benefit the Bruce High Quality Foundation University.

Artists include: James Bayard, Al Bedell, BFFA3AE, Allison Brainard, Sean J Patrick Carney, Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw, Sam Cooke, Petra Cortright, Leah Dixon, Ben Dowell, Fake Injury Party, Nandi Loaf, Emily McMaster, Dominique Palladino, Birgit Rathsmann, Siebren Versteeg, and May Waver.

Part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Art Seen programming.

Thu

Brooklyn Museum

Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 4th Floor
200 Eastern Parkway
7:00 p.mWebsite

Creating Evidence: Art and LGBTQ Rights

It’s difficult to be out in South Africa. That treatment extends past the country’s citizens, laws, and religions; it’s systemic even to its language. For example, IsiXhosa, a language spoken by over 20 percent of the South African population, only has negative words to describe the LGBTQ community. But there are artists like Zanele Muholi, whose photographs of LGBTQ citizens in South Africa try attempt to combat negative stereotypes through giving those who are out greater visibility. That’s just one tactic; there are others. Hear about other ways to “create evidence” on Thursday night with Malika Zouhali-Worrall, director of Call Me Kuchu; André St. Clair, a Jamaican born interdisciplinary artist; and Steven G. Fullwood, founder of the Black Gay and Lesbian Archive.

Fri

Joseph Gross Gallery

548 West 28th Street
New York, New York 10001
Friday: 11:00 a.m. - 10:00 p.m.; Saturday: 11:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.; Sunday: 11:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Website

Bad Dads VI -The Annual Wes Anderson Art Show

This is a Wes Anderson fan-art pop-up show; for two nights, gaze upon art referencing any and all Anderson films. Perhaps there will be paintings of furry creatures, vinyl records, and an assortment of men and women wearing odd hats? Perhaps you want to go because Anderson was your favorite in high school? Perhaps the truth is that he is now the cult-favorite of everyone who went to a liberal-arts college and currently resides in Fort Greene? Over 58,000 people have given an RSVP on the event’s Facebook page—and tickets are sold out. But have no fear, if you have money, there’s people selling off their tickets on Facebook! Scalping is illegal, y’all.

Hood Gallery

1397 Myrtle Ave.
Brooklyn, NY
8:00 p.m.Website

Bindle

Sorry Archive, the publishing and exhibitions platform conceptualized as a mischievous alter-ego is hosting one of the strangest art openings of the week in the dark alley behind Hood Gallery. What will happen here? It is a surprise. But apparently select guests might receive a bindle at some point throughout the night, containing work from one of the many artists participating in the event. What is a bindle, you might ask? It’s one of those sacks on a stick that caricatures of hobos carry over their shoulders. But with art inside. Don’t most train-hoppers who find their way to Bushwick usually just have a backpack full of 40s, a cracked iPhone, and a pitbull on a rope leash?

Artists:

Adam Tyson, Andrea Arrubla, Andrea McGinty, B Thom Stevenson, boys, Chris Oh, Deb Berman, Derick Wycherly, Frank Castanien, Frank Traynor, Isadora Frisby, Jeffrey Dalessandro, June West, Kyle Clairmont Jacques, Libby Rothfeld, Matej Vakula and Ashley Clark, Miao Jiaxin, Michael Merck, Mitch Charbonneau, Nicole Reber, Oscar Bedford, Reade Bryan, Robert Grand, Sean J Patrick Carney, Sophie Whitin, Stephen Zerbe, Tina Kohlmann, Tom Koehler, Will Rahilly, and Wyatt Burns

1-89 Beach 96th Street

Queens, NY 11693
Hours varyWebsite

The Palms

From the creator of Rockaway Taco comes the Palms, home to a mud pit, an art gallery, $5,000 imported palm trees. Though the Palms had a soft launch weeks ago, it’s not until Friday that the mud pit will be ready. Yes, you can get muddy with your friends and it’s totally normal. Here’s how Gothamist describes it:

Frank Traynor’s mud bath—which is less a spa treatment and more a “hang out with your buddies in a thick pit of mud”-type of thing—sounds especially worth the wait. It’ll cost $7 to get neck deep into the gloppy stuff for 15 minutes (four people can fit in the pit at a time, Traynor told me), then you all retire to an adjoining space to a) let the mud dry and stiffen all over your body, and b) drink some of his just-made seltzer.

Prediction: From Brooklyn to the Rockaways, a caravan of grooming-aware Williamsburgers will fill the highway with their Volvos every weekend, in order to receive the muddy spa treatment.

Sat

TRANSFER

1030 Metropolitan Ave
Brooklyn, NY
7:00 p.m - 11:00 p.m.Website

Joshua Caleb Weibley: Cruft

Weibley tackles the planetary crisis of e-waste using old-school corporate graphic design rendered in pen-on-paper. The artist hand-reproduces comically outdated industry-standard O’Reilly Media “animal” guides to coding languages and programming—which, in retrospect, are somewhat ironically emblazoned with silhouettes of the very wildlife now threatened by the industry’s obsession with obsolescence. Weibley’s cold, meticulous drawings—not unlike old dot matrix prints—are mathematical and calculating, but still a little imperfect and strangely human. His process adds another layer to a series that looks like it flirts with post-net art’s nostalgia for late-twentieth century tech aesthetics but is conceptually driven by a political critique of the industry’s rampant, irresponsible cycle of consumption and waste. Next time you’re tempted by an upgrade, think of the sea turtles!

Sun

American Medium

424 Gates Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
6:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.Website

Jaimie Warren: Somebody to Love

The last time we saw artist-performer-masterfully creative person Jaimie Warren put on a gallery exhibition, she dressed up as Freddy Krueger and smashed up paintings and ripped off a guy’s head inside the gallery’s office. And then Freddy Krueger found a friend in Stevie Wonder. Sunday’s opening promises a Renaissance/Freddie Mercury tribute made in collaboration with high-school students. Will there be a live performance, and maybe some singing? We very much hope so.

• The Australian artist Stelarc has grown a third ear on his arm. The implant will eventually include a wi-fi connected microphone that will broadcast what the new ear hears to a livestream that anyone can tune into globally. [CNN]

• The Guggenheim has appointed two new curators with the specific charge of commissioning artwork from Chinese-speaking countries. Hou Hanru, of Rome’s MAXXI, and Hou Hanru, of the Kadist Art Foundation, have been hired to curate exhibitions funded by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting contemporary Chinese artists. [The Art Newspaper]

• In other China news, the country’s art market is facing a massive contraction due to economic woes and a government crackdown on corruption. Sotheby’s and Christie’s mainland China sales have been hit especially hard, despite doing okay in Hong Kong. But the state-backed Poly Culture Group has carved a niche for itself in the mainland—it’s now the world’s third largest auction house. [The New York Times]

• There’s even a storm on the horizon for China’s knockoff art—known as shanzhai—market, which is usually pretty robust. The weird replica “Cloud Gate” that’s had the internet abuzz lately might be faced with a lawsuit from Anish Kapoor. [artnet News] 

• What do you do when you find other writers you know on Tinder? Here’s what happens when writer Alicia Eler finds Art F City’s Corinna Kirsch. [Crave]

• Not only has Chelsea gallery Hasted Kraeutler folded amid rumors of financial mischief, reports Kathleen Massara and Rozalia Jovanovic at artnet News, there is now a lawsuit brought by John A. Kraeulter against the gallery and others for $522,000. [The Baer Faxt]

• Twentysomething men who love David Foster Wallace are the worst. [The Awl via The Cut]

• Need money for art in Colorado? In Denver, the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation has decided to give grants only to art organizations. [Chronicle of Philanthropy]

• For your favorite climate-change denier, give the gift of a free online course on climate change from the University of California-San Diego. [Coursera]

• The plot thickens in the case of the Isabella Gardner Museum heist. A new suspect may have been identified from the newly-released footage of the 1990 theft—the largest art heist in American history. [ARTnews]

• Chelsea Manning could be thrown into solitary confinement for having an unauthorized copy of the Caitlyn Jenner Vanity Fair issue. [The Guardian]

• In related prison news, head to Governor’s Island to see Escaping Time: Art from U.S. Prison. The exhibition showcases artwork produced in prisons from around the country—an important and often overlooked corner of American culture (the U.S. has the highest percentage of our population in prison of any nation). [Huffington Post]

• Mind blown: the Olympics used to have medals for the arts!?! They stopped doing this in 1948, but how cool is that? [The Huffington Post]
• If you want to watch the Olympics in virtual reality, you can, if you care about sports, own a $99 Samsung Gear headset, and download an app. [USA Today]
• So the European Union has ruled that Dan Flavin’s sculptures are indistinguishable from light fixtures, and as such should be taxed at 20 percent, rather than the 5-percent rate for artworks. What? [The Guardian]
• This cat is having a no-good, existential crisis kind of day after ripping up a balloon. [Imgur]
• In our email inboxes: a note from SFMOMA that you can now purchase museum tickets online through January 2017. Are the lines really so long that tickets must be sought out so far in advance? Or does this just mean that museums are going the way of airlines, letting you plan out your vacation far, far in advance? [SFMOMA]
• The Jewish Museum launches its first Kickstarter campaign today. The museum has set a goal of $30,000 for their fall exhibition, Take Me (I’m Yours), which will let visitors bring home artist-produced takeaways, like temporary tattoos by Lawrence Weiner or air dispensers (not sure what that will look like) by Yoko Ono. 400,000 of these small editions will be made in total. [Kickstarter]
• Despite market turbulence, Sotheby’s actually saw an increase in year-to-year profits. This is mostly due to cost-cutting within the auction house. Sotheby's CEO, Thomas Smith, identifies “a paradox” wherein there’s still demand from collectors for high-value works in a financially uncertain time, but that sellers are holding out and restricting sales volume because they believe this isn’t the best time to sell. Dear collectors, please consider putting more of that pent-up purchasing power into the primary market. [Business Insider]
• Today marks the two-year anniversary of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and with it, the growth of #blacklivesmatter. [The Root]
• This piece about why fabric on public transportation is so ugly is surprisingly a really interesting read. It even touches on the work of artist Menja Stevenson, who dressed herself to match different transit lines. [BBC]