As with the Museum of Sex, in New York City, and the Museum of Ice Cream, in San Francisco, the Disgusting Food Museum is conceptually closer to an amusement park than to a museum. There are eighty-five culinary horrors on display—ordinary fare and delicacies from thirty countries—and each tour concludes with a taste test of a dozen items. -...
Justin Davidson refuses to relinquish hope. "The MTA, Amtrak, and NJ Transit have jointly released not one but two possible visions for rebuilding the rest of the Dantesque complex. And, lo and behold, they are both aspirational and realistic. The design ... amalgamates the jumble of bureaucratic fiefdoms, decades’ worth of duct-tape fixes, and a thicket of conflicting agendas into...
Instead, it's a way for independent digital artists to make a living. "Beneath the glossy auction houses, breathless headlines and outrage, there is a global ecosystem of crypto artists who entered the once-niche NFT art space motivated by passion and curiosity. Most aren’t raking in millions or leading major sales. But many are making a decent living — ditching...
"Art NFTs put me in mind of film auteur Werner Herzog’s distinction between the 'truth of accountants' and 'ecstatic truth.' NFT mavens wax lyrical about the 'authenticity' of these tokens as if they are trading a semi-divine quality, yet the authenticity encoded by an NFT is the same kind encoded by a transaction number on a credit card statement....
When artist Tabitha Soren had her third child, a friend suggested she photograph the experience. "Time can turn photographs into metaphor or allow them to become a symbol instead of a documentary picture; at this particular moment, mothers’ needs are on the minds of the country.  is about what mothers don’t show: the emotions and psychological states that we’ve all...
On the 10K Mount Scorluzzo in Italy, "the Austro-Hungarian soldiers who occupied those barracks were fighting Italian troops in what became known as the White War. There in the Alps — removed from the more famous Western Front, a site of bloody trench warfare between Germany and France — troops climbed to precarious heights in the stinging cold to...
Like the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, NY's City Artist Corps is a relief program that "will pay hundreds of local artists to beautify and activate public spaces across the city with murals, public artworks, performances, and more." - Hyperallergic
Some of the nation's top (male) artists are unhappy about the lack of drawing classes, bemoaning the lack of compulsory drawing classes at the Royal College of Art, Slade, and other art schools. Apparently, one says, "You now have people who are more interested in conceptual art – which is actually what you do if you can’t draw." -...
Someone even asked, "Are we going to pretend nothing happened?" But no, not at the fair itself: "To gain admittance at the Shed at Hudson Yards, visitors had to fill out an online questionnaire and upload their proof of vaccination or negative Covid test results before receiving a QR code. There were no exceptions. Even Michael R. Bloomberg, whose...
"A new online art project based on data from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Liverpool Biennial attempts to imagine 64 different curatorial statements and artist lists for future exhibitions, all 'curated' by a robot. … Each alternate universe is characterized by art speak that straddles the line between highbrow and utter incomprehensibility and is based on...
To date there are no large-scale programs or comprehensive models for dealing with defaced or removed monuments. However, the museum and heritage sectors — two professions that are founded on the essential notion of preservation — have been challenged by calls, largely from outside of these fields, suggesting that museums take in damaged or fallen monuments. - Hyperallergic
"The choice of collectives reflects the fact that few artists have been able to publicly show anything over the past year. It prompted judges to focus on groups of artists whose collaborative work has demonstrably continued, not always in the confines of a gallery. The shortlist is Array Collective, Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S), Cooking Sections, Gentle/Radical, and Project...
The Brutish Museums argues, persuasively, that the corporate-militaristic pillage behind Europe’s “encyclopedic” collections is not a simple matter of possession, but a systematic extension of warfare across time. - The Baffler
Far from being a dyed-in-the-wool slice of historic Caledonian kitsch, tartan design is very much alive and well in the 21st Century – as evidenced by the stream of new examples recorded each year at the Scottish Register of Tartans. And the range of inspirations is as diverse as the designs. - BBC
