On October 28th, 2015 OCAD University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and School for Interdisciplinary Studies presented a public lecture by Dr. Claire Bishop, art historian, critic, author, and professor in the History of Art Department at CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Entitled “Déjà Vu: Contemporary Art and the Ghosts of Modernity,” Bishop’s lecture critiques themes of the failure and ruin of modernity and utopia that she believes have persisted in contemporary art since the 1990s.
Beautiful interactive map of the wind in motion as it flows over the US in near realtime. Click to see today’s wind patterns as well a gallery of past patterns and a link to the website of the map’s collaborative creators, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. Zooming and tracking create interesting effects too.
…
It’s a good weekend to be in Toronto, as two of our best local bookshops have great stuff in store. In the always eclectic and unusual front window of The Monkey’s Paw on Dundas West, three original issues of General Idea’s FILE Megazine are prominently displayed. All three are from the art periodical’s early 1980s incarnation, which saw the masthead’s redesign after Time-Life sued the artists for copyright infringement in their parody of the iconic red rectangle. In its place is the layout you see here, which accurately represents the surprisingly beautiful design of the interior. The issue pictured above is priced at $100, which a cursory internet search reveals to be a third less than most other available issues out there.
…
By our calculations, The Thing Quarterly launched a full four years ago, with a hand-wringing window shade bearing silkscreened text by Miranda July. Each issue of The Thing, conceived as an object-based periodical, is the brainchild (or red-headed stepchild, depending on your aesthetic inclinations) of a different invited artist, writer, musician, or filmmaker, including the likes of Trisha Donnelly, Jonathan Lethem, Doo.Ri, and James Franco. Charged with the task of marrying a useful object with text, contributors have created, among other things, a bamboo cutting board with text seared into its surface (“Crying Instructions” by Starlee Kline), and a hefty rubber doorstop bearing a letter to Billie Jean King written by the artist’s much younger self (untitled, by Anne Walsh). The editors, Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan, are visual artists themselves, and the most interesting of the things they have produced walk an elegant or provocative line between literature, fine art, and functional object.
…
In the wake of Hennessey Youngman’s hilarious and pointed YouTube critique of Damien Hirst (linked below) in which Hirst gets skewered for: a) perpretrating “a perfect storm of banality”, b) oozing an unprecedented level of “Iroc-Z Axe Body Spray douchery” and c) yes, using money as his medium, it seems an opportune moment to take a look at some other recent money-based projects as an interesting counterpoint to the art of excess.
Just yesterday, Hyperallergic profiled Occupy George, an online initiative in which infographics visualizing aspects of the economic disparity in the US have been made available for anyone to download and print onto dollar bills. The stated intent? To circulate the stamped money as much as possible, passing knowledge to all who come across the bills.
…
Hello and thanks for visiting. We originally wrote this post at the beginning of December 2011, and as new information and events continued to unfold in the following weeks, we updated this page with fresh links and images. Now, as Occupy emerges from the winter months having given birth to an entirely new movement in contemporary visual culture, we feel it is appropriate to archive this post as a chronicle of Occupy’s visual beginnings, and allow the movement time and space to further evolve with respect to protest aesthetics in the arts and design, music and performance, giant puppets, flashmobs, bat signals, and whatever other forms it will eventually take. Thanks for the feedback and interest, and let’s all stay tuned.
…
Back in our museum days, we often extolled the virtues of the mid-afternoon nap to our superiors, who for some reason remained unmoved. Now, courtesy of the international architectural firm kawamura-ganjavian, we’ve found the accessory of (or perhaps for) our dreams, the OSTRICH pocket pillow. No more crawling under your desk for that much-deserved bit of rest and relaxation—with the OSTRICH you can power-nap in “privacy”. NOTE: Others will still be able to see you.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mTLO2F_ERY]
…
Enjoyed this.
