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Hyperallergic: Required Reading

MVRDV has designed South Korea’s version of New York’s High Line. It is a 983-metre-long park (~3,225 feet) on a 1970s highway destined for demolition. (via Dezeen, which has more images)

Christopher Knight reviews the new Marciano Art Foundation museum in LA. He writes:

The selection is highly personal. The mission statement is freewheeling (“Through exhibiting a diverse and compelling collection … MAF aims to encourage curiosity and contemplation of art.”) The professional staff is limited, as are public hours (Thursday through Saturday and only with reservations, which are free but already booked through June).

A walk through the galleries has something of the feel of an art fair, where random juxtapositions meet a few more organized combinations. More than 90% of the art in the debut presentation was made in just the last 10 years. The art is too new to have settled yet into historical frameworks and culturally revealing patterns. The galleries are at once jumbled and tame.

This entertaining review of the Venice Biennale from the Sydney Morning Herald is worth a read:

“The first reviews of this excruciating, pretentious non-spectacle made it sound like a life-changing experience. This testifies to another psychological phenomenon: expose a group of arty people to something boring and incomprehensible and they’ll swear it was magnificent.”

“Despite its upbeat subtitle – Viva Arte Viva – the 57th Biennale will go down in history as a lump of mediocrity suspended between poles of earnestness and silliness. This year’s curator was Christine Macel, of the Centre Pompidou, and her grand scheme was to make a Biennale “designed with artists, by artists and for artists”. This sounded like a better plan than making a Biennale with plumbers or parking meter attendants or dentists, but it seemed to disguise the fact that Madame Macel was the one doing the choosing.”

Chika Okeke-Agulu thinks African art is being gentrified:

During the colonial era, bands of looters — missionaries, scholars, security forces and fortune hunters — fanned out across the continent and, by force or guile, carted away vast quantities of Africa’s artistic heritage. Many of these masterpieces of ancient and traditional African sculpture now reside in major private and public collections in the West, with little chance of ever returning to Africa.

… Recently, my 72-year-old mother was looking at a glossy catalog of Igbo sculptures from major European collections, most of which were acquired during the Nigerian-Biafran War of the late 1960s. She told me that the disappearance of similar sculptures from our hometown shrines in southeastern Nigeria, and the end of the associated festivals, was one of her most painful memories of that war.

… African collectors and those based in Africa must participate in this market, for it is more likely that their collections will stay on the continent. Fortunately, this has already started. As Africa overcomes years of dictatorships and civil wars, its fledgling democracies have seen the rise of a wealthy, cosmopolitan class interested in supporting art and culture. A few collectors and art patrons have emerged as major players in these new auctions and fairs.

Is the “cultural elite” that Trump rails against out of touch? Writing for the Financial Times, Simon Kuper has some clear thoughts:

This is where the cultural elite’s self-image diverges from the view held by its critics. Trump voters see a class that talks equality while living privilege and exuding contempt. Here are Greenpeace members who are always on planes, proclaiming their goodness instead of improving the world. Maybe if everyone shopped at Whole Foods (the upscale grocery chain nicknamed “Whole Paycheck”) the world would improve, suggests Currid-Halkett. But there’s a counterargument: if everyone shopped at Whole Foods, it would lose its status, and the cultural elite would have to shop elsewhere. These people live in places and ways that hardly anyone else can afford. The only poor people they know are their nannies. Their New Yorker subscriptions might cost just $90, but are usually premised on expensive educations.

A funny story about the time airport security discovered a scientist’s 3D printed mouse penis:

Cohn, who’s based at the University of Florida, studies genitals and urinary tracts, and how they develop in embryos. Around 1 in 250 people are born with birth defects affecting these organs, and although such changes are becoming more common, their causes are largely unclear. By studying how genitals normally develop, Cohn’s hoping to understand what happens when they take a different path. And like many scientists, he is working with mice. He recently analysed a mouse’s genitals with a high-resolution medical scanner. To show his colleagues how incredibly detailed the scans can be, he used them to print a scaled-up model, which he took with him to the conference in DC. And because the conference was just a two-day affair, Cohn didn’t bring any checked luggage. Hence: the penis in his carry-on.

Carey Dunne talked to chemtrail conspiracy theorists in California and discovered some interesting things:

In early January, Tammi felt cautiously optimistic about how the Trump administration would affect organic farmers. Born in Canada, Tammi isn’t a US citizen, but given the option to vote – despite thinking Trump is “a prick” – she “probably would’ve picked him”. Given her environmentalism and hippie-dippy aesthetic, this shocked me.

While teaching me how to candy grapefruit peels, Tammi explained her optimism: Todd, her dairy farmer neighbor, claimed that “Trump promised to end chemtrails”.

Curious where Todd might’ve found this information, I Googled “Trump chemtrails”. It turned up a dubious news report from 16 January, which featured what looked like a screenshot of a tweet by Donald Trump: “My very first executive order will END the chemtrailing across America. #MAGA,” it read.

At first I couldn’t tell if the site was satirical, or whether the tweet was really authored by Trump – it wouldn’t have been the most outrageous missive from the man who once supported the “birther” theory.

Another Google search clarified that the tweet was impersonated. But if I’d encountered it as a middle-aged farmer worried about toxic clouds and untrained in spotting fake news, I probably would’ve told my friends that the president-elect had promised to end chemtrailing.

Photographer Erik Johansson’s surreal “Full Moon Service” is pretty captivating, and PetaPixel has some info about how it was made:

(via Petapixel)

This Baltimore demolish crew tore down the wrong building (story at Gizmodo):

RELATED? Jared Kushner has a questionable real estate business in Baltimore.

This is just funny:

Trump: Why do you keep saying "the power of Christ compels you" and hitting me with water?

Pope: Testing a theory. http://pic.twitter.com/V0jnONuFsP

— Crutnacker (@Crutnacker) May 24, 2017

FiveThirtyEight calculates the odds of Trump being impeached:

All that work … and I’m still not going to give you a precise number for how likely Trump is to lose his job. That’s because this is a thought experiment and not a mathematical model. I do think I owe you a range, however. I’m pretty sure I’d sell Trump-leaves-office-early stock (whether because of removal from office or other reasons) at even money (50 percent), and I’m pretty sure I’d buy it at 3-to-1 against (25 percent). I could be convinced by almost any number within that range.

We have reached peak latte:

Lattes Inside Avocados Are Now A Real Thing For Some Godforsaken Reason https://t.co/7xHT1glQRb http://pic.twitter.com/xNYoVaZvvl

— BuzzFeed Food (@BuzzFeedFood) May 19, 2017

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

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