Jim Dine. Car Crash at the Reuben Gallery, New York, 1960. Robert T. McElroy / The Getty Research Institute.
- How do you archive a performance? The Getty Research Institute has acquired Robert McElroy’s full archive of photos of “Happenings” in New York in the ’50s and ’60s. The more than 700 prints and 10,000 negatives include documentation of artists including Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg.
- Today, July 28, President Obama will award the National Medal of the Arts to, as NEA chair Jane Chu says, artists whose “creativity and passion have made an enormous impact on our nation.” Among the 12 recipients are artist James Turrell, choreographer Bill T. Jones, architects Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
- Using part of Joseph Beuys’ installation Fettecke (1982) and a dusting of Yves Klein’s IKB pigment, German artists Markus Löffler, Andree Korpys, and Dieter Schmal have distilled four pounds of fat into four liters of (questionably) consumable schnapps. Presented as part of the Dusseldorf Quadriennale, the trio’s performance was met with outrage by the artist’s widow, Eva Beuys, who called the destruction of part of Fettecke “crap and stupid.”
- In a video interview about her work with the Whitney, artist Christine Sun Kim, who was born deaf, explains the importance of inclusion and access to arts education and “of removing barriers for museum audiences, both online and in person.”
- Using the revolutionary CultLab3D
scanner—which composites 80 separate views of a sculptural work into a fully realistic digital model—Frankfurt’s Liebieghaus’ goal of a fully digitized museum collection, accessible worldwide, is now one step closer.
- As if to show how little has changed in 25 years, Spike Lee has spliced a clip from his 1989 film Do the Right Thing–in which the character Radio Raheem is suffocated by a baton-weilding police officer–with footage of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man killed last week by an NYPD chokehold.
- Due to a largely unregulated market and increasingly rising prices, art theft is now the third largest criminal racket worldwide. Recent estimates of illegal sales range from 6 to 8 billion dollars a year, and are only surpassed by the drug and arms trades.
- “Jasper Johns better have an airtight alibi.” Authorities are investigating who replaced two American flags on the Brooklyn bridge early Tuesday morning with white-bleached flags. No one has yet come forward to indicate whether it’s art or protest. While some suspect artists and others—including some media outlets—took at face-value claims of responsibility by the parodic Twitter account @bicyclelobby, no arrests have been made. Meanwhile, a petition is urging the NYPD: Please don’t solve the white flag mystery.
- “I always thought art was about truth and beauty, was I just being a dumb idiot?” In its inaugural episode, the parody webseries Touching the Art features a deadpan Casey Jane Ellison leading a talk-show–style discussion on “Franco-ian Art,” sexism, and art’s definition with guests Bettina Korek, critic Jorie Finkel, and artist Catherine Opie.
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