Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Viral Reading

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More than two million YouTube viewers have watched this woman read a book. Imagine that.Update: Dec. 30, 2015 — That number is now 18.86 million. Yes, you read that right. Further Update: Oct. 2, 2024 — Viewers now number 30 million. The woman is Stoya, and she’s a porn star. The book is Necrophilia Variations, […]

Color Them In: Legends of the Lower East Side

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I can’t let the year end without taking note of a new coloring book — yes, a coloring book — titled Legends of the Lower East Side. It’s a collaboration of the artists Troy Harris, Orlando Bonilla and the unstoppable documentarian Clayton Patterson. The book features their confederates in nonconformity, artistry, community activism, and “colorfulness.” […]

When Billboards Are Ripped and Abstracted

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Richard Sargent likes to take pictures of them. “Photographing torn posters is a cliché in which I continue to indulge,” he writes. In fact, his photos of “decaying urban billboards” — all of them shot in northern California’s East Bay cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, and Richmond — transform that cliché into brilliant works of […]

L’artiste Lui-même

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Norman Ogue Mustill in his desert lair. [Self-Portrait With Collage] In 2007, at my request, he took a photo of himself with several of his collages from the mid-’60s. This is one of them. Blogs are personal (in case you hadn’t noticed). EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Frida K Lives On …

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Depending on who’s talking, the cult of Frida Kahlo has either been amplified or demystified by the centennial touring show that started out in Minneapolis, is now in Philadelphia, and is soon heading to San Francisco. I second Peter Schjeldahl (“The world will have cults, and who better merits one?”), as well as Holland Carter […]

Boris Lurie, R.I.P.

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The epigraph on “NO!art MAN,” a major 2001 documentary about Boris Lurie, who died earlier this month, says it all: “In a time of wars and extermination, aesthetic exercises and decorative patterns are not enough.” Those are Lurie’s words, and now they might as well serve as his epitaph. obit by Colin Moynihan in The […]

The Ghost in Their Machine

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John McWhinnie@Glenn Horowitz Bookseller through Oct. 13 on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — comes as something of a surprise. Their work is not high on the list of swank art collectors. Hell, I’d be surprised if it’s on the list at all. And I don’t think McWhinnie’s Peter Plagens said to me about a Nelson […]

John Bryan, RIP

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They left 12 roses on his doorstep along with half of their kidnap victim’s California driver’s license. He was grateful for the roses. “They could have been 12 bullets,” he said. The kidnappers were the Symbionese Liberation Army. The license belonged to Patty Hearst. The year was 1974. The roses were both a warning and […]

MOCKING THE VICTIMS

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Slate “Orphaned,” about children victimized by Hurricane Katrina. On the right is the opposite page, the first of four luxurious pages advertising Eileen Fisher “Alive in the World” clothing that were sandwiched inside DeParle’s piece. “New Orleans was always a place of unsettling juxtapositions,” DeParle writes. So, apparently, is the print edition of the magazine. […]

BIT OF NEPOTISM

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Taking a break from the blog, but before I go . . . I figured I’d mention a cousin o’ mine — Carol Edelson — cuz she’s got a show of recent work goin’ up soon at the Martucci Gallery in Irvington, N.Y. Actually, this bit of nepotism is just an excuse to post an […]

HERE’S A STRETCH

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Almost forgot about Holland Cotter reports in this morning’s New York Times, there will be a boatload of special events, like Holly Crawford, who organized the event. I don’t know her, never met her. But she invited me, gawd help her. I’ll letcha know what happens. Postscript: From Los Angeles … EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

ANTHEM FOR AMERICA

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Wrapping up the week’s nervous breakdown, we bring you TwinPak. With Tom Delay coming to a head as Libby face possible indictment, a Harriet Miers debacle and her Congressional protection for the gun industry now achieved by the NRA, FEMA’s negligence and incompetence “some background noise here,” we think of Mustill’s score as a fitting […]

MILTON GLASER ♥ DISSENT

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To keep Independence Day from becoming a more empty patriotic ritual than usual, let’s celebrate the hearty dissenter Milton Glaser, designer of many famous logos and symbols such as interviewed on PBS’s “NOW” about the “Design of Dissent Exhibit” at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and his and Mirko Ilic’s new book, […]

FOR THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE

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A tour of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the official name of the Berlin Holocaust memorial designed by Peter Eisenman, draws a powerful review from architecture critic Nicolai Ourousoff, whose reviews have usually left me cold. But not this time.

BORIS LURIE’S ‘NO!ART’ & THE HOLOCAUST

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By Jan Herman Today, when the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau is recalled with “the mournful whistle of an imaginary [death] train,” the little-known No!Art art of Boris Lurie looms like a signal from the remembered depths. See, for example, his “Red Shit Sculpture” (below), or “Immigrant’s Box”, or “New York-Rumbula” (bottom), or “Bowl of Chains,” or […]

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