COURTESY CREATIVE COMMONS
Mystery Men
According to the Wall Street Journal, a former CIA officer arrested on charges of unlawfully retaining classified information has been suspended by Christie’s as its head of security in Hong Kong. “The auction house said Wednesday it had suspended an unnamed employee pending a criminal investigation,” the report reads. “A person familiar with the situation told the Wall Street Journal that the employee was Jerry Chun Shing Lee, who was arrested Monday after arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.” [The Wall Street Journal]
Ooh la la, check out this headline: “Man Ray in L.A.: what happened when the pioneering artist hit Hollywood.” The Guardian has the story, on the occasion of a Man Ray show at Gagosian Beverly Hills, and it begins like so: “In the autumn of 1940, Man Ray met a traveling tie salesman at a party in New York. The American artist had arrived back in the U.S. earlier that summer, having spent nearly two decades in Paris. The salesman said he was planning a cross-country trip to Los Angeles; Man Ray decided to catch a lift.” [The Guardian]
Somebody found Frank Zappa’s face miraculously emanating from a doorknob, Dangerous Minds reports. [Dangerous Minds]
Resist
The Guardian has the story of “One Year of Resistance,” a group show in New York with Trump-era work by more than 80 artists of varying backgrounds. “While the space is small,” the paper reports, “the proximity of the pieces to one another evokes the kind of hand-in-hand solidarity that’s been on display in the last 12 months.” [The Guardian]
“In 2011, the Brooklyn-based photographer Brian Kelley began collecting old MetroCards, a project that soon transformed into a zealous obsession,” the Paris Review states at the top of an image gallery of cool old New York City subway finds. “After scouring all of the city’s 472 stations, he widened his scope to include maps, pins, tokens, buttons, uniforms, promotional papers, and other historical artifacts.” [The Paris Review]
Tech
Rejoice in yet another way to not-understand Bitcoin, by way of a visualization engine that the Next Web calls “Bitcoin as art.” [The Next Web]
“Long before the Google Arts and Culture app, which became the most downloaded mobile app over the weekend,” the New York Times reports, “art aficionados, dabblers, narcissists and soul searchers pondering a cosmic connection to distant humans have been searching for their art twins, a long-gone, sometimes fictional or unknown doppelgänger encased in oil, sculpture or ceramics.” [The New York Times]
Considerations
Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson talked to the Art Newspaper about his thinking behind a big rehang at the museum. “I have set out three pillars that inform our curatorial choices and how we communicate them,” he said. “These are a trio of relationships: art and society, history and the present, and Britain and the world.” [The Art Newspaper]
For the New York Times, Jason Farago reviewed “The Face of Dynasty: Royal Crests From Western Cameroon,” a small exhibition at the Met, and he really liked it. “Put them together, examine their differences, understand their African political significance and their western aesthetic impacts, and you have a thundering show,” he wrote. [The New York Times]
Aperture has a story about Andre D. Wagner, a photographer from Omaha, Nebraska, who has taken to taking pictures of people on the New York City subway. “Wagner’s images feel as if they have always been here,” Jessica Lynne writes, “inviting viewers to marvel at the quiet beauty of even the most familiar scenes.” [Aperture]
Bookish Type
The Last London, a book by Welsh writer Ian Sinclair including profiles of W. G. Sebald, several visual artists, surveys “modern life, as seen by an artist without a phone,” according to the Washington Post. The book contains a description of Walter Sickert, the late-19th-century artist, as a painter of “dead-cigar Sunday afternoon ennui after laboured coitus in rented railside properties.” [The Washington Post]