Construction plans for Guggenheim’s new fancy digs in the United Arab Emirates have been “temporarily” shelved, as the state-run Tourism Development and Investment Co. is “reviewing its strategy for handing out jobs to contractors.” Lest we forget, 130+ artists boycotted Gugg Abu Dhabi for allegedly swindling migrant construction workers into indentured servitude. Read more »
Twenty-one year old artist Anna Sinkova has been in jail for almost three months for frying eggs on the “Eternal Flame” of a veteran monument in Kiev, Ukraine. She was denied bail today. Read more »
The Lower East Side’s Orchard Windows Gallery has neighborhood parents very upset because their children are getting a gander at painted gang bangs on the way home from PS 42. Hampton artist Nick Weber defends his work, saying that kids are exposed “to much worse” these days, like “people getting shot on TV.” (NSFW) Read more »
Every time Brooklyn artist Tom Otterness installs another public sculpture, someone brings up that he once adopted a pound dog just to shoot and kill it for a film. His next piece for the New York Public Library in Battery Park was commissioned for $750,000 by an anonymous donor. Cue cyclical uproar. Read more »
This mysterious new artwork is a direct response to the most recent destruction of an Andres Seranno’s Piss Christ print in France, or, rather, to our collective profiteering from the controversy and “real human conflict.” Piss Christ gets smashed: The media gets attention, the fundamentalists mobilize supporters and Seranno gets even more famous. Enter The Resurrection of Piss Christ – a completely anonymous, deliberately derivative image of Jesus in urine – a free web art object that you can freely download, distribute and abuse as you wish. Brilliant! No?! Send your death threats here.
This is Fabienne Cherisma, a 15-year-old girl shot by police in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti for looting two plastic chairs and three framed pictures. Paul Hansen’s photo on the left recently won best International News Image at the Swedish Picture of the Year Awards. Nathan Weber’s photo on the right shows fourteen photographers crowing at the scene to get the money shot. Read more »
Here’re some randy artworks from the “Pornucopia” excess and porn-themed art show at the Allegra LaViola Gallery. Randy! Yet, it was the relatively tame nude pizza-face and happily-nippled skipping girl in the window display that caused vocal protesting from the adjacent Orthodox community, three visits from the police in the past two weeks and Yeshiva schoolboys banging on the glass. Read more »
German sculptor Marcel Walldorf’s Petra (2010) has the German law enforcers in a huff. Of course, the striking detail we’re all staring at is the riot baton propped against the wall over there. Read more »
Whitewashing censorship controversy aside, Blu has been paid “directly” by Jeffrey Deitch and not by the museum. Still no word from the Wooster Collective, despite their promise!
In a letter to famed graffiti photographer Henry Chalfant (below), Blu gives the most complete commentary on MOCA whitewashing his mural. Deitch never asked for a sketch. On the 6th day of painting Blu was just drawing the dollar bills when Deitch decided the mural was offensive. Blu stopped. Deitch asked for a different mural. Blu declined. Deitch asked for Blu to sign a press release which Blu considered “self-censorship” and declined. As of yet, Blu has not been paid. Read more »
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