JEFFREYW/COURTESY CREATIVE COMMONS
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Unorthodoxy
For the sake of an art festival called “SubSurface: Site Specific Sight and Sound,” Carnegie Mellon University sent some 110 students, faculty, and alumni down into a former limestone mine. The setting for what the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called a “thoughtfully curated” affair: a decommissioned mine with an “inconceivably vast, 50 million-square-foot interior.” [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
The Museum of Failure has taken up a new pop-up home in L.A. after a formative run in Sweden this summer, the Los Angeles Times reports. Its subject is a mass of ill-conceived innovations, and among its riches are Coca-Cola BlāK, Trump: The Game, and Colgate-brand Lasagna. [Los Angeles Times]
News
The Getty Center closed to protect its collection from smoke from wildfires tearing across California, CBS Los Angeles reports. It will remain closed on Wednesday as well. [CBS Los Angeles / Twitter]
Forbes has a profile of Marc Spiegler, the global director of Art Basel. Regarding the fairs he helms, he said, “I really do think for the people who put the time in, they will always discover new things, new artists, new movements.” [Forbes]
In the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl calls the new Stephen Shore survey at MoMA “immersive and staggeringly charming.” [The New Yorker]
Work
For Artforum, on the occasion of her survey show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Dara Friedman holds forth on Dichter, a video piece featuring people reciting their favorite poems. “I wanted to summon the emotion often felt by teenagers of being passionately sad and yet full of energy,” she says. “I wanted to feel like that again, and figured if I wanted to, others probably needed to as well.” [Artforum]
In the Guardian, a visually rich photo gallery pays tribute to work by Chilean artist Juana Gómez, whose “hand-embroidered photographic canvases combine the spheres of scientific exploration with ancestral tradition.” [The Guardian]
Collectors
Check out what’s hanging at the house of Hamptons art collector Rick Friedman and his partner Cindy Lou Wakefield, courtesy of the New York Times’s “Show Us Your Wall” column. Among the locales integral to their origin story: the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. [The New York Times]
“The real-estate billionaire Jorge Pérez has accused Miami-Dade County of slashing funding for the museum that bears his name as ‘punishment’ for an exhibition of Cuban contemporary art,” the Art Newspaper reports. At issue is part of a grant that was promised to the Pérez Art Museum but went to the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora instead. [The Art Newspaper]
Drama
An essay in the Paris Review wonders about opera in a “post-Weinstein world.” “In this modern moment,” writes Daniel Foster, “it’s difficult not to hear opera as the highly aestheticized echo of our deeply sordid reality, a harmonization of voices wrung from women’s suffering. Louder and clearer than ever, I’m hearing opera as critics like Catherine Clément long have: as the undoing of women by men.” [The Paris Review]
“As a young man, Jim Goldberg, the acclaimed Magnum photographer, had an ambition: ‘to get out of New Haven as soon as I could.’ ” So begins the tale accompanying a New Yorker photo gallery of pictures shot decades later, in 2013, of the hardscrabble city he escaped. [The New Yorker]