Left: Orlan. Bump Load, 2009; mixed media; 170 x 100 x 200 cm. via orlan.eu. Right: Cover image for Lady Gaga’s album Born This Way.

Two years ago, French artist Orlan sued pop star Lady Gaga in French court for plagiarism over the singer’s cover art for her 2011 album Born this Way and the eponymous, award-winning music video. Now, Orlan is taking the case to New York City, seeking testimony from members of Lady Gaga’s creative team, over whom French courts do not have jurisdiction.

On Wednesday, lawyers representing Orlan filed documents—all publicly available—seeking subpoenas for fashion director Nicola Formichetti and makeup artist Billy Brasfield. The documents order the pair, both responsible for the visuals associated with the album, to appear at a district court on February 12. Known for undergoing multiple sessions of plastic surgery in the name of art, Orlan is claiming that Gaga ripped off two specific pieces, echoing the same alien-like aesthetic the French artist supposedly controls.

“In order to promote her album, Lady Gaga did not hesitate to plagiarize the entire ORLAN universe,” one document reads. “Indeed, the singer ‘Lady Gaga’ not only did not hesitate to copy ORLAN’s theme and aesthetics, but she also infringed upon several of the artist’s famous works without permission to do so.”

Read the entire article here.

on May 15, 2015.

Citing “the University’s unethical treatment of its students,” the entire class of first year MFA students at USC’s Roski School of Art has decided to leave the school, according to a statement they released today. The seven students list a number of grievances leading to their decision, beginning with a significant decrease to the generous tuition subsidization that they had expected before their acceptance to the program. They also criticize the school’s administration that “did not value the Program’s faculty structure, pedagogy, or standing in the arts community.” As a result, they say, the Program Director left in December 2014, followed by the resignation of tenured professor Frances Stark.

After numerous meeting with the administration, they write:

[W]e have no idea what MFA faculty we’d be working with for the coming year; we have no idea what the curriculum would be, other than that it will be different from what it was when we enrolled and is currently being implemented by administrators outside of our field of study; and finally, we have no idea whether we’d graduate with twice the amount of debt we thought we would graduate with.

In the midst of this upheaval, the university was eagerly celebrating the arrival of the Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy, which came with a $70 million gift from the music industry giants. Focused on art, technology, and entrepreneurship, the undergraduate program is also headed by Erica Muhl, the newly appointed Dean of Roski. The Academy’s tagline, “The Degree is in Disruption,” employs a favorite techie term, which the student statement addresses:

[F]aculty voices are silenced and adjunct faculty expands, affecting their overall ability to advocate for students. We seven students lost time, money, and trust in a classic bait-­and-­switch, and the larger community lost an exemplary funding model that attempted to rectify at least some of these economic disparities. What we experienced is the true ‘disruption’ of this accelerating trend.

Read the full article here.

Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke. The 3D Additivist Manifesto, 2015 (screenshot).

Not long ago I wrote an article celebrating the work being done by cyberfeminist collective Deep Lab. In a post-Snowden world that’s seen few legal or structural changes since the first leaks, and one that’s filled with male-dominated tech conferences that sound more like advertising than critical discussion, I still consider Deep Lab’s work to be invaluable.

However, after the piece was published, Dorothy Santos—a writer, curator, and friend who’s currently organizing an exhibition on privacy and surveillance and their relationship to gentrification in the Bay Area—wrote to me to express concerns about the lack of women of color (WOC) and queer or trans women of color (QTWOC) artists in Deep Lab. She questioned why I didn’t discuss that lack of representation in my article.

With Santos’ encouragement, I decided it would be valuable to do a follow-up piece and include perspectives from WOC and QTWOC artists and writers regarding Deep Lab, new media and technology-based art, and representation. We emailed a small questionnaire to twenty such women. Seven responded, and their comments are featured below along with Santos’ own answers. We encourage any WOC/QTWOC readers to comment on this article or email to share your perspectives. As Deep Lab continues its work in 2015, with exciting partnerships with the MIT Media Laboratory and NEW INC, we hope these voices will be taken into account.

Read the full article here.

William Powhida, Bill by Bill, installation at Charlie James Gallery, April 2013

When Marcel Duchamp submitted his signed urinal to a group exhibition in 1917, he certainly couldn’t have predicted that his decontextualized toilet would represent the dawn of an era in which everything and anything could be “art.” Take some mundane object or action, add word salad — et voilà, you have art. Manipulated photographs aren’t simply manipulated photographs. They are “visual statements that are at once documentary and fictional.”

A painter’s brush strokes don’t come together to form a picture, are textures that “function as proof of past operations.” And a piece of taxidermy isn’t just a stuffed animal. It’s “a state of apparent life premised on actual death.” In the Bermuda Triangle of Art, an object is never an object. It’s a physical vessel with which to deliver heaps of impenetrable prose — prose intended to convince some aspiring patron that the mound of detritus before him is pregnant with meaning (in addition to looking great over the couch).

Read the full article here.