January 28, 2023

Hello from Athens! I visited the National Museum of Contemporary Art Αthens (EMST) yesterday and was delighted to hear that this massive art museum is almost completely government funded. Can you believe it? Coming from the US, it's hard to believe that a major contemporary museum can sustain itself this way. It is refreshing to read in the current exhibition program that the museum "regards art and visual culture as a transformative element in education, knowledge production, storytelling and as a driver of socially progressive and emancipatory values in society." What a breath of fresh air. 

This week, we asked reporter Jessica Shearer to interview visitors to the new MLK monument in Boston, and she found that most people didn't mind the work but found the context confusing.

Reporter Rhea Nayyar weighs in on a TikTok art trend that, she writes, might read as an "art school freshman’s first found-footage project in Adobe Premiere Pro (no, I’m not projecting) presented with the societal dread induced from doom-scrolling on one’s phone at 2am after one too many bong rips on a weeknight (again, not projecting …)."

And Eileen G'Sell writes from St. Louis about the influence of Futurism's aggressive kineticism on Barbara Chase-Riboud’s sculpture; KT Thompson looks at Virgil Ortiz, a Pueblo artist who brings kink to craft; and philosopher and critic David Carrier explains why he turned down an invitation to an exhibition in Saudi Arabia.

— Hrag Vartanian, editor-in-chief

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What Does TikTok’s “Corecore” Have to Do With Dada?

As art history buffs on the app have pointed out, both movements attribute meaning to the meaningless. | Rhea Nayyar 

IN THE NEWS

• NYC’s Department of Transportation has completely whitewashed the graffiti tunnel of Washington Heights’s 191st Street subway station.

• An exhibition at Arkansas Tech was taken down after several students of color deemed Dominique Simmons’s artworks “racially insensitive.”

• The American Alliance of Museums puts the Orlando Museum of Art on probation after its exhibition of disputed Basquiat paintings.

• The Peruvian government has indefinitely closed Machu Picchu and the famous Inca Trail in the wake of ongoing political protests.

MONUMENTS & COMMUNITY SPACES

An Afternoon in the Park With Shahzia Sikander’s Golden Monuments 

The artist’s three-part commission at Madison Square Park includes a mythical female figure atop the Manhattan Appellate Courthouse. | Rhea Nayyar 

What Do Bostonians Think of the New MLK Monument?

Despite the deluge of online memes, reactions on the ground were mostly positive, but some think the work lacks context. | Jessica Shearer 

What Makes a Good Arts District?

Along Phoenix’s Roosevelt Row, development has pushed out several art spaces during the last decade, resulting in a “manufactured” arts district. | Lynn Trimble

TRANSFORMING SCULPTURE

Barbara Chase-Riboud Breathes Life Into Bronze

The aggressive kineticism of Futurism in Chase-Riboud’s sculpture is tempered by a keen appreciation of the erotic and lyrical. | Eileen G'Sell

Shining a Light on a Dark Chapter of American Pottery 

Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina brings awareness of both Edgefield’s awesome artistry and poet-potter David Drake’s odds-defying life to a sizable audience. | Ekin Erkan

The Pueblo Artist Who Brings Kink to Traditional Craft 

Gender play, kink, and futures that touch traditional lifeways are enduring features of Virgil Ortiz’s work. | KT Thompson 

DIGGING DEEPER

Seeing Ourselves in Greg Colson’s Quirky Pie Chart Paintings 

The artist’s droll paintings present the pie chart as a useful monitor of a group’s behavior, while also revealing it to be exclusionary and superficial. | John Yau

A Darkly Whimsical Take on Feminine Sexuality 

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s exhibition A Pancake Moon made me reflect on my experience of freezing my eggs. | Jennifer Remenchik

This Exhibition Claims That “All Art Is Virtual” 

But is it, really? | Jordan Eddy

MORE ON HYPERALLERGIC

Why I Won’t Be Visiting the Warhol Show in Saudi Arabia

I couldn’t in good conscience accept an invitation to an exhibition hosted and sponsored by a brutal regime. | David Carrier

The Unlikely Story of a Van Gogh Deemed “Immune From Seizure”

A Brazilian collector sued the Detroit Institute of Art over a loaned Van Gogh he claims is his, but a judge dismissed the lawsuit. Here’s why. | Andrew Karpan 

The Design Duo Behind Pink Floyd’s Iconic Aesthetic

Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) is a reasonably informative, if rather dry, look at a subject with much more potential for exploration. | Dan Schindel 

Required Reading

This week, blonde hair supremacy, Salman Rushdie’s new novel, and why do boutique shops all look the same? | Hrag Vartanian and Lakshmi Rivera Amin

COMICS

My Comics Collaboration With DALL-E 

I wondered: Could the AI image generator and I develop a shared, unique “voice” in our creative output? | Amaris Feland Ketchum