Alfredo Jaar. A Logo for America, 1986. Public intervention at Times Square, New York, USA. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York. © Alfredo Jaar
In 1986, the words “This is not America” appeared inside an outline of the US on a Times Square billboard every six minutes. Alfredo Jaar’s A Logo for America returns, but will new conditions—it screens from 11:57 pm and 12:00 am throughout August—render it futile?
- Filmmaker/video artist Harun Farocki, whose works were “deeply critical of the media and ways in which images have shaped contemporary life and ideology,” passed away July 30 at age 70. His “Serious Games” series—a four-part look at modern warfare—is currently on view at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof. ArtFCity offers a round-up of tributes.
- A job posting at the new Marina Abramović Institute, which crowd-funded more than $660,000 to open, is reigniting dialogue on unpaid internships in the art world. At issue, the high level of experience wanted from applicants, exchanged for “nonmonetary, intangible benefits.”
- In “Gaza and the Loss of Civilization,” David Byrne hosts two editorials on Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza. In one, Brian Eno wrestles with the US’s “blind support of this one-sided exercise”; in the other, Peter Schwartz looks at a “historic impasse” in which “[t]here is no way back.”
- “Photographers and artists are alchemists at the highest level.” For BOMB’s Oral History Project, Carrie Mae Weems interviews photographer Adger Cowans about personal history, alchemy, and what pulls an artist to an image.
- Citing Jürgen Habermas, who wrote that the early art critic “retained something of the amateur,” Brian Droitcour looks at the potential of Yelp—for which he’s written more than 100 reviews of galleries and museums, aka “vernacular criticism”—to “help reset the terms of art criticism.”
- From shiny inflatable “cobblestones” used during May Day protests in Berlin to radio power resistors pinned to Poles’ lapels in the Soviet Union, the V&A’s new exhibition, Disobedient Objects, illuminates the history of protest design.
- Culled from his facetiously-created Twitter account of the same name, artist Cory Arcangel’s new book, Working on My Novel, is a collection of retweets by self-described writers who are struggling to maintain focus, writing status updates instead of novels.
- Elsewhere in Twitter-art news, Greg Allen has created a series of unsanctioned silkscreens based on tweets by @TheRealHennessy, aka artist Jayson Musson. The project, writes Allen, is inspired by Donelle Woolford’s Dick Joke series: “Wittingly parodying the uncomplicated jokes from vernacular literature, the artist has found a way of incorporating a difficult subject-matter—humor—into a deeply serious artistic practice.”
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