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Vito Acconci Lube From The Best Chelsea Art Bus Tour In Town, Probably

“WHat is the difference between NeO-MoDerNism and MoDErn AbSTraCtion???!! Why is some art SO EXPENSIVE?? Why is it so hard to find female artists in Chelsea???” We have often wondered about these things. Thankfully, artists Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw are going to give bus tours of Chelsea now. We’ve previously run into Jen and Paul strapped to […]

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Artist’s Notebook:
Leah Schrager

ANIMAL’s feature Artist’s Notebook asks artists to show us their original “idea sketch” next to a finished artwork or project. This week, Leah Schrager talks about the origins of her infamous performance project Naked Therapy, as well as German expressionist dance choreography, erotic photos and WordPress themes. Naked Therapy started as a proposal to the world on the […]

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Listening to William Basinski’s “Cascade”

William Basinski played his recent work Cascade at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn last night. The sold out performance of the evening-long work was accompanied by visuals — a field of bright blue blurs, dulling, darkening, slowly bursting in small flares. The single looped element of the work shared that glow — a softened, distorted piano, a […]

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“Balaklava Snacks”
And Other Bizarre Commissioned Webcam Performances

Artists Eva and Franco Mattes have just launched a new project crowdsourcing a massive body of performance video work. There are several online services where you can pay people to do things on camera. Some of them aren’t even erotic. And now, it’s art. For project BEFNOED, the creative duo pays webcam workers to perform specific actions. The “Balaklava Snacks” series […]

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Inside BHQF’s Women Artists Only Last Brucennial

“The art world is still a boys’ club,” artist Mollie McKinley told ANIMAL. Before a nude performer bent herself over Z Behl’s giant-horned sculpture and the crowd flooded in, we crashed the instal of this year’s massive Brucennial group show in the Meatpacking Disctrict. Soon, the lines would stretch around the block in the freezing cold and the GoPro we taped to the […]

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The Armory: Better With the Internet

The Armory Show came and went with its hundreds of galleries. There was no Playoff Bracket. No one won an MVBooth Award. Sometimes, there is just no unified curatorial arch or higher implications in the motifs of a pile of stuff. Well, there are niche market trends. This year’s focus was on hot-shit galleries from […]

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A Brief Encounter With
Post-Pussy Riot Nadya and Masha

Last week, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, formerly of Pussy Riot, were the center of a cocktail party fundraiser for the VOICE project, an NGO that ran their legal fund. I say “center,” rather than “hosts.” Nadya and Masha smiled for the cameras, paid tribute to Russian political prisoners, then disappeared upstairs. Their appearance lasted […]

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The Last Word on Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog

It’s 2014 and mocking Jeff Koons is just not fun anymore. Jeff Koons’ stupid balloon dogs, Damien Hirst’s stupid dots, Marina Abramović’s stupid eye contact — for those of us tap-dancing on the cracking crust between “art” and “mainstream culture” coverage, simplifying our half-felt blow-offs into blog posts is not worth perpetuating Koonsbramohirst’s omnipresence, not worth the minor news they […]

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Three Celebrities I Would Eat, Now That We Eat Test-Tube Beef

This morning in london, the first burger made from “Cultured Beef” was cooked and eaten by Chicago author Josh Schonwald and Austrian food researcher Hanni Rützler. Grown in a petri-dish using real flesh cells harvested from a cow and a “nutrient solution” of amino acids, minerals, sugars and fats, the in-vitro beef was pan-fried and burgered, […]

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