Who wants to feel good? Just read this post at Brain Pickings: Patti Smith’s Advice to the Young, by Way of William S. Burroughs by Maria Popova. Smith offers sage advice – in both sound byte and video format – and it’s all stuff we want to hear. The short video was made by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and it doles out a lifetime of wisdom to young artists. “To be an artist — actually, to be a human being in these times — it’s all difficult. … What matters is to know what you want and pursue it.”
Where does William Burroughs come in? Smith says that the best advice she ever got was from the author, who said this, but probably with a few more expletives: “Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful — be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.” I love you, Patti Smith.
Yeah that’s right: An-My Lê does interviews with lots of publications… Art Forum, Bmoreart … no big deal. In this Art Forum piece called 500 Words, the photographer discusses her photographs of the Coast Guard. Lê speaks to Leslie J. Ureña about working on her first commission: “photographs of the Coast Guard, recently installed in the USCG’s newly opened headquarters at the Department of Homeland Security campus in Washington, DC.” You can see Lê’s work in “Front Room: An-My Lê” at the Baltimore Museum of Art from October 9 to February 23, 2014.
Everyone, including AIA’s Tracy Zwick, is talking about the Mike Kelley Retrospective at Moma PS1. It’s the largest show the museum has organized since opening in 1976 and fills the entire building from the top to the basement, where Kelley’s voice is projected in the stairwell.
According to Wired Magazine’s Kyle Vanhemert, there’s a new and amazing app for Making Movies on Your iPhone that actually look like, you know, real movies. All you need now is James Franco.
Jerry Saltz has been on a soapbox lately. His latest diss in NY Magazine: comparing Mega-Galleries to the Death Star. The four giants in question are Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, and Pace and they’re growing!!! Besides this, Saltz says they are turning promising mid-career artists into overblown has-beens by branding them and letting the brand supersede the actual art. He calls this phenomena Capitalist Realism. It’s an interesting argument and Saltz has lots of colorful examples of good artists gone bad.
The Guardian’s Anna Johnson says you can start an art collection with $1,000 or less. Johnson says “I collect art and I am not rich. And most people I know, including very serious collectors, began their collections with $1,000 or less.” I think artists tend to be mystified by collectors and art collecting in general, and Johnson comes off as respectful and not ridiculously rich, so this article is a gift.
This sounds awesome! Allison Meier at Hyperallergic discusses The Foods Forever Lost to Climate Change, an exhibit/food truck that simulates the experience of eating vanished foods through an “apparatus-based eating experience.” The truck was parked outside Quiet Earth, an opening at the Rauschenberg Project Space, presenting “environmentally-sensitive” works by Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, Agnes Denes, and Maya Lin. GhostFood was presented by the Newark-based Gallery Aferro, a collaboration between artists Miriam Simun and Miriam Songster.
AdWeek’s recent story by David Griner featured ads using Real Google Searches to Show the Scope of Sexism Worldwide. The powerful campaign idea comes from UN Women and uses real google searches to indicate global opinions about women and gender inequality.
