COURTESY PIXABAY
Studies
Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler went to Congress to talk about funding for the NEA and wrote about what he learned. [The Hill]
A study in the Netherlands looked at art made by 11- and 12-year-olds in an effort to measure the effectiveness of arts education, which is societally important but on the decline. [The Atlantic]
The “In Other Words” blog for the Sotheby’s advisory arm Art Agency, Partners is transformed into a special issue with a theme: “America.” [Art Agency, Partners]
Art
Here’s a profile of Leo Fitzpatrick and his curatorial thinking behind a new group show at Marlborough Contemporary in New York. “When I was growing up, it was very intimidating to go to a gallery,” he says. “I didn’t like that. I thought art should be for everybody, including kids who come to the gallery to steal a beer. Maybe they’ll see something.” [Vogue]
Photographer Carolyn Drake spent weeks taking pictures of the porous borderlands between the U.S. and Mexico. [The New Yorker]
Novelist Heidi Julavits took a “pilgrimage (with children) to see Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s profound testament to catastrophe.” [The New York Times]
“Claude Monet used brushes, Jackson Pollock liked a trowel, and Cartier-Bresson toted a Leica. Mario Klingemann makes art using artificial neural networks.” [Wired]
Changes
Here’s a profile of Maria Balshaw, the first female director of the Tate network of museums in England. [The New York Times]
Gavin Russom, a synthesizer player in the disco-rock band LCD Soundsystem, has come out as transgender. [Pitchfork]
Pictures
Roberta Smith praises the new Met show “Talking Pictures: Camera-Phone Conversations Between Artists” as “one of the savviest, wisest, most revealing museum exhibitions of the summer.” [The New York Times]
“Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album,” an exhibition at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, features photos from the 1960s, including really cool ones of Billy Al Bengston and Ed Ruscha. [The Guardian]
Past/Future
Ever wonder what an unseen video of Nirvana playing at a Radio Shack in 1988 would look like? [The Culture Trip]
Google Blocks “lets users build colorful 3D models in VR.” [The Verge]