#environment #conservation #access #resources #water #public art #civic art #biennials Los Angeles is a metropolis built on a delusion: that engineering can overcome a basic lack of sufficient resources to meet the popular need. Five years into a severe drought, one would think conservation would be on everyone’s mind, but the clean cars and green lawns all around town suggest otherwise. To increase discussion of[…..]
#Townhouse #Cairo #gentrification #urban #culture #displacement This past week has left the venerable nonprofit Townhouse Gallery shaken. Though the attempted demolition of its building at 10 Nabrawy Street in Cairo has been halted, the gallery is faced with months of work ahead to secure its future. Operating since 1998, Townhouse is known for drawing international artists and thinkers to Egypt, and nurturing an emerging network of[…..]
#capitalism #markets #institutions #gentrification #innovation Two recent unconventional gallery openings on the West Coast have upended expectations about how the commercial and nonprofit sectors of the art world correspond to and interact with one another. Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s seven-building complex in Los Angeles’ downtown arts district is a commercial gallery with institutional ambitions, promising thematic exhibitions, high-profile loans, publishing, and scholarship. Minnesota Street Project,[…..]
#utopia #nostalgia #technology #street art #counterculture Technology and utopia are united in a certain subset of counterculture in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia at the Walker Art Center. The show illustrates the ideals and limitations of the utopian imaginings by artists of the 1960s and early 1970s with early computer graphics imaging, speculative architecture proposals, political posters, and installation art. In contrast to ideal societies,[…..]
#art #class #wealth #access #innovation #middleclass Writing for Artnet in January, Ben Davis’s “Do You Have to Be Rich to Make It as an Artist?” raised an important question about the relationship between privilege and access to a life in the arts. Examining the upbringings of a number of artists currently or recently on view at museums in New York, Davis drew the conclusion that if[…..]
#museums #empathy #posthuman #Anthropocene #environment Recent headlines demonstrate that human beings are consistently terrible to one another, and it can be tempting to reject the human altogether. Drained by a year of public and private deaths, numb with exhaustion after having a child and returning to work, I entered Diana Thater’s mid-career retrospective at LACMA and found that those worldly concerns quickly fell away. Thater’s[…..]
#museums #access #collections #markets #historicity #gentrification With the arrival of the new Whitney Museum on Gansevoort Street, New York’s once notorious Meatpacking District completes lower Manhattan’s transition from a no-man’s-land populated by artists and outcasts to a stomping ground for fashionable elites. Befitting of an institution that represents the American art world—which has long positioned itself within both these groups, often simultaneously—the Whitney would seem[…..]
