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It’s a Thursday morning in Beijing, and the world’s most famous living artist, Ai Weiwei, is sitting with one of the world’s most controversial technologists, Jacob Appelbaum, in the second-floor lobby of the East Hotel. [...]
On a whim, Ai suggests that they call Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been living for the last two years at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. [...]
Ai and Assange talk for several minutes about the mundanities of the dissident life.
— fusion.net
This lively effort — mapping — is the subject of a rich exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) and BRIC [...] that pairs the work of 18 contemporary artists with 23 historical maps dating back as far as 1562. For Mapping Brooklyn, BHS opened its collection to the invited artists [...]. The goal of uniting these two components — map and art — is to uncover the common ground: to render, through judgment and artistic process, the world legible. — urbanomnibus.net
Related: Mapping the City: maps through the eyes of street artists View full entry
Dressed in reflective yellow construction gear while working under the cover of darkness early Monday, a small group of artists installed a tribute to NSA-leaker Edward Snowden in a Brooklyn park.
But it was gone by midday.
The Snowden bust stood atop a column at the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene Park, a site built to honor more than 11,000 American prisoners of war who died aboard British ships during the American Revolutionary War.
— mashable.com
222 Bowery is an Italian-inspired palazzo for the beggars. — Times
JULIE EARLE-LEVINE writes about the artist John Giorno’s home for over fifty years in Bowery."The address housed New York’s first Y.M.C.A. in the 1880s — in what was then one of the worst neighborhoods in Manhattan, frequented by prostitutes and alcoholics. Much has changed since the poet... View full entry
There are roughly 11,000 Starbucks locations in the United States, and about 14,000 McDonald's restaurants. But combined, the two chains don't come close to the number of museums in the U.S., which stands at a whopping 35,000.
So says the latest data release from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent government agency that tallies the number and type of museums in this country. [...] the 35,000 active museums represent a doubling from the number estimated in the 1990s.
— washingtonpost.com
Located in Garden Valley, Nevada, Michael Heizer’s City is one of the most significant works of art in the United States. Begun by Heizer in 1972, the project is now in its final stage of completion. It will, in the future, be accessible by the public. [...]
To see the land developed into a site for military, energy, or waste purposes, would ruin it forever. After 43 years of work, can it really be destroyed like this?
— unframed.lacma.org
Notable American museums publicly expressed their support on Twitter via #protectCITY. The LACMA petition to protect Michael Heizer's City and the Basin and Range can be reached here.Previously on Archinect: Michael Heizer's massive desert sculpture, "City", will make you cry View full entry
German-based graphic designer Matthias Jung creates imaginative houses, that we'd like to encounter in real life. He calls his creations 'architectural short poems', that aim to visualize another perspective on how we could see the world and live in it. The homes are put together from photo material that he collects and re-arranges in unexpected ways. — ignant.de
The State Hermitage Museum signed a protocol of intent on Wednesday, 11 March, with the St Petersburg-based LSR development group to open a satellite branch of the museum in Moscow, on the grounds of the landmark former Soviet ZIL automobile plant. [...]
Also present was the Canadian architect Hani Rashid who will design the satellite with his New York-based firm Asymptote Architecture. Russian media report that construction is due to be completed by 2018.
— theartnewspaper.com
Already a couple years old, but a great piece by Tom Sachs on the beauty and nature of plywood. h/t kottke.org View full entry
But how to draw the distinction between unauthorized graffiti and murals? Late last year, city officials issued thousands of dollars worth of fines before admitting they couldn't tell the difference between vandalism and authorized artwork (they eventually dismissed the fines). To correct this, Castañeda-López says the city is working on the seemingly Herculean task of creating a registry for all Detroit's existing street art. — metrotimes.com
To stay in Chelsea and retain his lease, Mr. Kaplan [of Casey Kaplan Gallery] said, would have required paying twice the rent and taking on a much higher share of his building’s escalating tax rate. Instead, he elected to move to a new space in the Flower District, on 27th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues. It will have double the square footage, he said, for half the cost [...] The Flower District doesn’t draw the same kinds of numbers but is already on the art-world radar. — wsj.com
Another question: why do neighborhoods keep getting branded "the New _______"? View full entry
The popularity of video games shows no sign of waning, and museums have ramped up their interest in the medium. [...]
“Sorry MoMA, video games are not art” was the headline on Jonathan Jones’s blog [...] after New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announced the acquisition of 14 video games, including 1980s classics “Tetris” and “Pac-Man”. “All hell broke loose in an interesting way,” said Paola Antonelli, a senior curator in the museum’s department of architecture and design [...].
— theartnewspaper.com
Related: Tate Museum Creates Minecraft World Inspired by Famous Paintings View full entry
“There’s very little real architectural information that we get from a photograph,” the photographer Grant Mudford claimed during a panel last Friday hosted by Photo LA, an annual photographic exposition. In its 24th year at the REEF in the historic LA Mart building, Photo LA provides a... View full entry
Street artists are showing how they’d map cities differently in a new show that lets visitors step into their clandestine worlds.
[...] Mapping the City, an exhibition of the responses by 50 international street artists to being asked to map their cities “through subjective surveying rather than objective ordinance”. Conventional cartography this is not.
— theguardian.com
The perennial tendency to make of beauty itself a binary concept, to split it up into “inner” and “outer,” “higher” and “lower” beauty, is the usual way that judgments of the beautiful are colonized by moral judgments. — brain pickings
Susan Sontag would have been 82 years old this week. Here is a link to some of her illuminating writings as pointed by Maria Popova. We could use some of these ideas applying them to architecture as we, hopefully, move towards more "interesting" criticism after a period of sling-shotting and... View full entry