Art

The art world is used to a little controversy, but how about from two established art titans? In the trail of scandal that has surrounded it for months, Skin Fruit opened last week at the New Museum in New York. The show features the notorious collection of Dakis Joannou, who is a Greek magnate, international art collector, New Museum trustee, and close personal friend of Jeff Koons. The art world beef arises at the seemingly shady intersection of the circumstances. Continue…

If fashion week has you in a bit of style hangover, than find repose and inspiration in art. Austrian artist Lies Maculan has hopped the pond to bring The Dream Shop. No, there isn’t all you can grab Lanvin gratis. This kind of dreaming involves a photo-realistic installation of 100 desires and wants. Think a tease on surrealism dabbled with a sense of humor. With the support of Erin Fetherston, Arden Wohl and Kipton Cronkite, the pop-up launched late last week but will be open to the public starting this Tuesday.

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There’s a territorial dispute over the walls of New Orleans. On one side are the ever more prominent street artists and the other is the anti-graffiti vigilante known as the Grey Ghost. Fred Radtke, aka the Grey Ghost, is notorious for his tag, a simple swatch of grey paint applied with a roller, which he lays down exclusively on top of other people’s work. Although in the past the city government applauded him for “simply doing what the city would do if it had the money”, in 2009 he was arrested for painting over a commissioned mural, fined and explicitly forbidden to continue with his crusade against street art. Continue…

Whether it’s finding out too late that your cell phone hasn’t been receiving calls or fretting over whether it’s okay to respond to a Facebook message with a text, we all know that technology makes communication both limitless and painfully complicated. Annie Abrahams is exploring these fragile relations via a series of networked performance pieces in her solo exhibition, If Not You Not Me at the HTTP gallery in London. The show highlights her idea that “communication guided by machines doesn’t go by the same rules, nor uses the same abilities as “normal” communication.” Continue…

It’s pretty safe to say that being an established blogger makes you something of an authority on the pulse of your field. So if the mind behind Art Fag City, Paddy Johnson, says there is an artistic resurgence in Romanticism and that she’s curating a show with this theme in mind, it must be worth exploring.

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In 1936, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange would take two of the most iconic images we know—the portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs (she of the clear glare and flat line lips) and Migrant Mother (with her two huddled children and mile long stare). Taken while Evans and Lange were employed by the United States government to document the toll of the Great Depression on American lives, we sometimes forget that these photographs of economic collapse and national tragedy more particularly are portraits of women and children. Continue…

What with the whole nineties revival thing making itself known with the resurgence of Doc Martens, crop tops, and Clintons in the White House, it seems like a brand new girl power trend might not be far behind. Kiki Smith has long been a champion of feminine awareness and is known for incorporating social and political themes in her work. She provides a post-feminist argument, acknowledging femininity without overdoing it. Continue…

In the age of Google Earth, Sanzhi, Taiwan has become best known for a project that was never completed: On the shore of this sleepy township is an abandoned 1980s resort referred to as “Sanzhi pod village.” Via satellite, the pods appear as bundles of cheerful candy pastilles, pink and blue apartments stacked on top of each other. In person — and as captured by photographer Magda Biernat in Continental Bounce, on show through March 2 at Soho’s Clic Gallery — you can see paint peeling from the pods, the broken floor-to-ceiling windows gawping over a planned swimming pool that now resembles a swamp. After years of neglect and coastal weather, the complex conveys something like a post-apocalyptic tourist resort from the latest sci-fi flick. Continue…

Galleries around the globe, particularly those of a smaller variety, are delving into mixed media and graphic art in a big way. Channeling modes of illustration, street art, graphic design, and animation, New Faces opened last week at Recoat in Glasgow, Scotland. This show explores the territory of character design, which is, in case you aren’t familiar, exactly what it sounds like. Amy Whitten, director of Recoat and one of the curators of the show elaborated, “Character design has become a genre all of its own. Some designers base their entire career around it, developing characters for advertising, animation, films, comics etc. For others it is just an obvious expression of their ideas and they use the characters they design to show viewers their comments on society and humanity.”  Continue…

Up-and-coming and blue-chip stars alike are hitting the snowy slopes of the Sundance Film Festival for a bit of mountainside fun meets Tinseltown. While there are plenty of indies worth waiting in line for, we were pleasantly surprised to find the animated film Dock Ellis & The LSD No-no amongst the contenders. We first caught the hilarious short online where it spread like wildfire in the sports crowd, but now that it’s hit glam Sundance, we predict a trippy 70s revival on the horizon.  Continue…