The Empire State Building—the apple of our apple, the diamond of our city, the second best-looking skyscraper we have—is often lit up for some dumb occasion, like a Yankees win or Christmas day. On Friday, however, art will be the star as the building is illuminated with works from the new Whitney Museum.
When Banksy lands in a city and begins a street art-making spree, there's a routine that usually follows. First, the stenciled paintings are ignored, then, after people realize what they are, they are gawked at and occasionally vandalized. Eventually, they are cordoned off and protected from the public, and finally, they are physically removed, and someone makes a lot of money, or hopes to. An extreme version of this complex lottery played out for one unlucky family in Gaza recently.
Art is whatever people think it is, and what people think it is depends an awful lot on context: For example, whether the work is being displayed in an art museum by a dapper bloke in glasses and a vest, or whether it's sitting alongside other copies of the exact same print in an IKEA, with a listed price of €10.
Several more cultural institutions have taken measures to ban selfie sticks, adding to the growing list of public places where the wand of idiocy will not be tolerated. The Palace of Versailles, Britain's National Gallery, and the Colosseum are among the newest institutions to impose the selfie stick ban.
In another assault on Iraq's cultural legacy, Islamic State militants reportedly destroyed the remains of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud Thursday, an attack Iraq's tourism and antiquities ministry says "defy the will of the world and the feelings of humanity."
In case the regular beheadings and sermons of terror aren't enough to convince you that ISIS is full of very bad dudes, they've taken sledgehammers to a priceless collection of ancient art.
Today marks the opening of the 2015 Triennial at Manhattan's New Museum, billed as "the only recurring international exhibition in New York City devoted to early-career artists from around the world." From the looks of things, there's a lot of art to wade through, but in the eternal quest for virality, one work has emerged an early standout.
Museo Jumex, an art museum that opened in Mexico City in 2013, is embroiled in its first controversy as an institution. Barely a week away from the opening of an exhibit featuring the works of Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch, Museo Jumex canceled it, claiming that the art would be too disturbing for citizens to look at.
In America, we love our advertising. So much so that when a vessel that's ordinarily used to assault our eyeballs with neon-colored laundry detergent advocacy suddenly stops trying to sell stuff to us, we immediately assume that the terrorists are finally at our door.
Let's set the scene: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, early afternoon, on a cold winter Sunday. You, an admirer of Impressionism, are taking in a portrait of a woman relaxing by the seashore, painted by French master Renoir. A metal pole and a man in a green Canada Goose jacket appear in front of the painting. He is flashing a dirtbag grin in your direction.
When I talk about my downtown life as a kid, people ask how old I am. Growing up in New York City in the 70s was more like being an urchin of the 30s than a silver spoon of the 80s. I'm more likely to share recollections with a 70-year old—playing stoop, jumping off the piers—than to wax fondly upon the boy bands, cocaine, and angular sports cars of Ronald Reagan's second term.
Art is free to create. Art is free to experience. Art belongs to all of us. Art is, in many ways, the opposite of money. And when you mix art with money, this is what you get: art that is wasted.
