An “unselfie” by Alec Soth, via Instagram.
The “unselfie,” writes the New York Times’s Sam Anderson on Alec Soth’s Instagram series of self-portraits obscured by snow, leaves, pixels, and the like, “documents and annihilates. What we most want to see, what the traditional selfie most wants to show, is absent—and so we are forced to look even harder.”
- As danger and visibility come together in the age of “extreme selfies,” can art still be shocking? David Flusfeder looks back at the history of dangerous and shocking performance pieces in light of a current cultural phenomenon.
- Following the Walker’s recent convening on curating performance, Creative Capital’s Lisa Dent shares her list of 10 tips for performance artists working with museums, covering topics from achieving audience diversity to ensuring performance documentation. The moral of her story? “Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. If you and the curator are clear about your goals, everyone will be better off, now and in the future.”
- In a seemingly paradoxical project, Joe Hamilton explores how digital images can help us appreciate art that is “derived from an artist’s bodily gestures, rather than those that are derived from code-based practices.”
- Filmmaker Wim Wenders on why he focuses on terrain when his real interest is people: “I am interested in what traces we leave in landscapes, in cities and places. But I wait until people have gone, until they are out of the shot. So the place can start talking about us.”
- Twenty-five years after the reunification of Germany, artists and activists are fighting to keep the Berlin Wall standing as a memorial to the struggle for reunification. The East Side Gallery, a mile-long stretch of paintings on the historic barrier, is threatened by the construction of luxury apartment towers.
- MoMA PS1 joins a handful of New York City institutions that are resisting the trend of rising entrance fees, announcing that admission will be free to New Yorkers for one year. “[The museum] has many exhibitions that should be seen by everybody from all five boroughs.”
- “I don’t know if anybody was expecting a nine-minute slow-build weird freakout John Cage–style video to get 70,000 views in like, four days”: CERN physicist James Beacham on the band Deerhoof playing in front of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
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