Tag Archives: art

In 2011, Burning Man sold out for the first time in 25 years. Next year, there will be a new way to get tickets. The process will require ticket seekers to register by price tier during a two-week period that has yet to be announced. They will then go through several lottery rounds for each pricing tier, and the ones …

Yesterday afternoon I delivered Hugging Towers to the administrators of the World Trade Center Memorial & Museum. (Interestingly, their offices are in the building owned by the company that is allowing the protesters to camp at Zuccotti Park.) Hugging Towers was received with appropriate reverence and after I signed a couple of legal documents surrendering ownership, we had a nice …

I don’t…wait…what?

I don’t why this cracks me up so much.

In early May of this year I blogged the following: One week after 9/11, I rescued the above unsigned painting from the front wall of the elementary school on my Chelsea street. It was one of hundreds affixed there in what doubtlessly was a group therapy project for the children. A violent rainstorm had just begun when I removed it …

As part of an ill-conceived art installation, last weekend New Yorkers saw the words “LAST CHANCE” written in smoke over Manhattan, sending thousands of worried residents to Twitter. NYC Councilman Peter Vallone is furious, but the group behind the idea is defending it. “We did not intend for the artwork to be alarming in any way,” Friends of the High …

For the first time in the long-running event’s history, tickets to this year’s Burning Man have sold out. Shortly after tickets started selling at the fastest pace ever on Jan. 20, officials with Black Rock City LLC, the SF-based company that staged Burning Man in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, privately warned that they may sell out this year. The event, …

One week after 9/11, I rescued the above unsigned painting from the front wall of the elementary school on my Chelsea street. It was one of hundreds affixed there in what doubtlessly was a group therapy project for the children. A violent rainstorm had just begun when I removed it and by morning the hundreds of other drawings lay ruined …

After weeks of demonstrations, yesterday Catholic protesters in France destroyed NYC artist Andres Serrano’s classic and controversial Piss Christ. The UK Guardian reports: The work has previously been shown without incident in France, but for the past two weeks Catholic groups have campaigned against it, culminating in hundreds of people marching through Avignon on Saturday in protest. Just after 11am …

Google has launched Art Project, an interactive site allowing users to wander around the world’s great museums and zoom in on masterpieces with great detail. Pretty damn cool. And talk about an internet time suck!

A coalition of Tea Party-backed Congress members headed by wingnut Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) plans to cut 100% of all federal funding for the arts. A group of conservative Republicans, called the Republican Study Committee, revealed a new plan on Thursday to cut federal funding for arts down to zero. This means the National Endowment for the Arts and the …

New York City’s Museum of Modern Art has acquired the video created by late gay artist David Wojnarowicz, which was pulled by the Smithsonian after an outcry from the GOP and the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue. The museum acquired both the original 13-minute version of the video, titled “A Fire in My Belly,” and a separate 7-minute excerpt made by …

“In a large survey of museum-going households released in April, it was found that they are significantly better educated and affluent than the U.S. population; they are also overwhelmingly white. The time has come, then, to stop funding the leisure of rich white people: all public monies for the arts should cease. Quite frankly, to make the working class pay …

“It still seems an unwritten rule in establishment Washington that homophobia is at most a misdemeanor. By this code, the Smithsonian’s surrender is no big deal; let the art world do its little protests. This attitude explains why the ever more absurd excuses concocted by John McCain for almost single-handedly thwarting the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ are rarely …

“If there are no common standards of decency, there is no moral community, and where there is no moral community, there is no country. If we cannot agree on what is beautiful, moral and decent, are we really ‘one nation, under God, indivisible’ anymore? [WaPo art critic] Gopnik and the Post have put critics of the gallery’s sex show on …

“The Battle of the Smithsonian is more than a Ben Stiller movie–it’s reality for conservatives on Capitol Hill, who are disgusted by the latest exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. Just across the street from FRC headquarters, a month-old display called “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” is causing quite an uproar for a series of images that range …

More Christianist bullshit about the gay video exhibit that I reported on yesterday. (Via – Truth Wins Out)

The Catholic League, that one-guy-with-a-computer outfit headed by anti-gay nutjob Bill Donohue, has successfully pressured the Smithsonian into removing an AIDS-themed video exhibit by the late gay artist David Wojnarowicz. Because for eleven seconds, ants can be seen crawling on a crucifix. The Smithsonian acted after incoming GOP House Speaker John Boehner and incoming GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor …

Several months ago, a lot of you were plotzing over Ginger Williams’ hand-painted Golden Girls nesting dolls. Ginger writes us this morning with the news that the dolls are now available on eBay.