STEVEN DEPOLO
Signs o’ the Times
Infowars, the website run by indignation aficionado (and political monster) Alex Jones, does not like modern art, a storied human endeavor described as “an endless parade of meaningless debris that promises nothing and delivers nothing.” Might you like to see by way of a video screed what a commentator there thinks of Cy Twombly? (It involves a 2-year-old toddler—and ketchup.) [Infowars]
Jack Pierson is “among the latest celebrity artists to team up with a luxury label, such partnerships affirming art’s rising stature as fashion’s most compelling new muse,” the New York Times reports. Pierson’s plea to Dior, on the occasion of helping to design a handbag: “Don’t let me do some nerdy thing that isn’t chic.” [The New York Times]
Bling
“King Tut: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh,” a big touring exhibition of ancient Egyptian riches, will premiere next year in Los Angeles at the California Science Center. “The interest in displays of King Tut objects has rivaled performances by big musical acts or sporting events,” the Los Angeles Times reports in a story that cites possible economic impact as high as $352 million. Call it a pyramid scheme! Wait for “Mummy Dearest” to take over the headlines! Wonder if Steve Martin will show. [Los Angeles Times]
On the occasion of a Jay-Z portrait painted for the cover of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Times writer Janelle Zara paid a studio visit to Henry Taylor, “a star player in the art world for his empathetic portraits—of neighbors, fellow artists, and Drake included—rendered in dense blocks of color.” [The New York Times]
Guilty as Charged
For “White Man on a Pedestal,” a project by the artists Kenya (Robinson) and Doreen Gardner now on show at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, a grisly statue pays biting reverse-tribute to the previously celebrated gynecologist J. Marion Sims and “the black women he tortured through bloody, nonconsensual, and nontherapeutic surgeries without anesthetics,” according to the Paris Review. [The Paris Review]
Forgery might have a new foe, according to findings reported by Axios: “In a new paper, U.S. and Swiss researchers say artificial intelligence could be the best detective of all—sometimes from a single stroke, AI can detect a fake every time.” [Axios]
Silver Screen
Jack Hambleton, a downtown New York peer of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, is the subject of a new documentary, Shadowman. The New York Times calls it “fascinating, harrowing,” and states that “Mr. Hambleton, by dint of staying alive, never sold at extravagant prices.” [The New York Times]
Fine film critic J. Hoberman holds forth on “The Non-Actor,” a series of movies programmed for Lincoln Center by Light Industry’s Ed Halter and Thomas Beard. An overview of the sprawling survey for the New York Review of Books includes intriguing lines of thought like this: “In contrast to these cinematic halls of mirrors are the radically stripped-down narratives by two utterly dissimilar film artists, Robert Bresson and Andy Warhol.” [The New York Review of Books]
Disparity
According to the Art Newspaper, the “Artist Income Project” found that “the majority of artists in the UK earn less than £5,000 a year after tax—and below $10,000 in the U.S.—according to a survey of 1,533 practitioners.” [The Art Newspaper]
Photographer Tuca Vieira, who took a striking picture of disparity between rich and poor in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2004, talks in great detail to the Guardian about an image that continues to sear more than a decade later. The interview is part of a series on “Cities,” supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. [The Guardian]
Fusilli, You Crazy Bastard!
Do you like New Yorker cartoons? Of course you do. Have you ever seen them acted out theatrically? Of course you haven’t. But now you can—courtesy of a TV bit featuring stage actors and erudite editor David Remnick on Late Night With Seth Meyers. [NBC]