The Walker Curates the News: 04.27.15

Still from Oliver Laric's animated gif _Lincoln 3D Scans_, 2014

Still from Oliver Laric’s animated gif Lincoln 3D Scans, 2014

Is arts writing seeing a generational shift akin to the Post-Internet generation in art? Or do we need a new generation of writers to face new topics and aesthetics? Andreas Schlaegel digs into the question, surveying 21 critics, including Carson Chan, Jörg Heiser, and Ana Finel Honigman.

  • In grimly apropos timing, the Center for Art on Migration Politics—Europe’s first nonprofit exhibition space focused on migration—opened in Denmark just days before 800 people died when a human-smuggling ship capsized in the Mediterranean. “We want to allow the issue of refugees to be broached more visually instead of just discussing it on another panel or at a conference,” expresses CAMP co-founder Tone Olaf Nielsen.
  • What happens to a Donald Judd sculpture when repurposed as furniture in a Calvin Klein store? As copyright laws and traditional notions of ownership become obsolete, “the question isn’t whether something is a knock-off or an original, but what it signifies and to whom.”
  • New media art is not about illustrating the effects of the latest gadget, but about  but about questioning cultural change, imagining it differently, or creating dissonance with the process of innovation,” stresses Surround Audience co-curator Lauren Cornell in an interview with Kate Neave.
  • James Meyer, a longtime assistant to Jasper Johns, was sentenced Thursday to 18 months in prison for stealing and selling 37 of the artist’s unfinished works. He expressed regret for his betrayal of someone “who will forever have great meaning in his life.”
  • “It is the ideology of the artistic mode of production” and the post-Fordist economy at large which have promoted gentrification, and not artistic practices by themselves. Taking Detroit as a reference point, Vince Carducci examines the relationship between art and postmodern gentrification.
  • Challenging the hegemony of Google—and the search engine’s online catalogue of street art—French muralist MTO has created a series of large-scale works Italy, including a massive 404-message declaring the “Mural Not Found.”

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