Stunningly sculptural hanging bookshelves by Lebanese-French designer Charles Kalpakian (via Artsy)
This week, sound art theory, Yemen’s embattled museums, troubled arts philanthropy in Toronto, British Surrealist Leonora Carrington, Russian internet trolls, galactic Easter eggs, and more.
Brian Kane of Yale University has a lot to say about the current state of sound art. It’s a great introduction to current debates on the topic:
Whether sound art is an emerging discipline or old hat, there is no doubt that the theory of sound art is currently a cottage industry. You can test the veracity the claim by perusing at the spate of books that have been published on the topic. To get a representative sampling, I recommend a quick glance at the catalog of books on sound published by Continuum. Starting with Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner’s anthology Audio Culture from 2004, there’s been a new book on sound and sound art on Continuum just about every 18 months: Brandon LaBelle’s Background Noise: perspectives on sound art in 2006, Paul Hegarty’s Noise/Music: a history from 2007, Seth Kim-Cohen’s In the Blink of an Ear: towards a non-cochlear sonic art from 2009, and Salomé Voegelin’s Listening to Noise and Silence: towards a philosophy of sound art from 2010. (We’re due for a new one any day now.) Add to that list Doug Kahn’s now classic Noise Water Meat, Alan Licht’s Sound Art, Caleb Kelly’s edited volume Sound from the Whitechapel Galley series and you are on your way to a healthy bibliography.
The Royal Ontario Museum’s fundraising campaign for their Daniel Liebeskind–designed “Crystal” facade made headlines around the world, but the reality of unpaid promises and donations that never materialized shine a light on the floundering state of arts philanthropy in Toronto and Canada:
“In my experience, I have not heard of such large pledges going unfulfilled in Canadian philanthropy,” said Don Johnson, a Toronto philanthropist who sits on the boards of four charitable foundations, including the Toronto General & Western Hospital Foundation.
… In 2009, only two years after agreeing to take on the debt, bureaucrats were sounding the alarm about the ROM’s unfulfilled pledges. In a confidential briefing note to the then-minister of culture, Aileen Carroll, ministry officials explained that the museum had received only 50 per cent of the donations promised that year.
… On Wednesday of this week – one month after his first interview with The Globe – Mr. Ajmera said he was now in compliance with the two-year-old policy on naming rights, which stipulates that 25 per cent of a pledge must be paid before a space can be named. Mr. Ajmera said he has given the ROM more than $1.25-million, or one quarter, of his pledge. (An official close to the museum said Mr. Ajmera made a “significant payment” toward his outstanding pledge after his first call from The Globe.) In Wednesday’s interview, Mr. Ajmera said he was serious about meeting his obligation to the ROM.
In response to the turmoil in Yemen, most of the country’s museums and cultural centers have closed:
While months of political unrest in Yemen had already led to the closure of many of the country’s museums and foreign-run cultural centres, the threatened escalation to a full-scale proxy war this month will threaten the country’s last independent art spaces.
The Basement Cultural Foundation in the capital Sanaa remained active until at least 20 March, when horrific bombings at local mosques killed 142 people. But with schools and universities now shutting down, the popular underground art centre is unlikely to risk staying open, said Ibi Ibrahim, a leading Yemeni-American artist and photographer.
The story of one reporter who was under surveillance by the Abu Dhabi authorities:
Sean O’Driscoll, who co-wrote a damning investigation into human rights violations and brutal labor practices endured by migrant workers building New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi published by The New York Times, was officially deported from the United Arab Emirates last October. Before that happened, he says he was tailed for months by pursuit cars, bribed, propositioned to spy on other foreign journalists and possibly traced by way of his cell phone. Here’s the story of what allegedly happens when a journalist tries to report on unflattering activity in the UAE.
Every afternoon at four o’clock, people gather on the third floor of the Harvard Art Museums to watch them turn off the lights on the famous Harvard Rothkos, which were “destroyed” by too much light exposure. This peculiar art historical event is considered by Louis Menand at The New Yorker, providing a concise summary of the history of these panels:
Although Rothko set conditions on the installation—for example, he wanted fibreglass curtains installed to protect the paintings from exposure to too much light—the murals quickly began to deteriorate. People liked the spectacular views, so the curtains were rarely closed, and there were no guards around to warn diners about splashing food and drink on the canvases, or bumping their chairs into them when they got up to use the restroom. It was a working dining room, not an art gallery or a chapel.
Concerns about the condition of the murals started to be raised soon after Rothko’s death, in 1970. By the end of the nineteen-seventies, the penthouse was being rented out as a “party function room.” Tears and dents began showing up on the paintings; a person named Alan C. sought immortality by inscribing his name on one of them; the colors faded. Harvard is famously decentralized, so no one knew who was ultimately responsible for looking after the murals. It wasn’t until 1979 that they were finally taken down and put into storage. They had lost most of their original color.
Kriston Capps sings the praises of the unsung designers of Milwaukee’s “hand-crafted bus passes,” which will no longer be made:
For nearly 100 years, Milwaukee has been designing and printing weekly bus passes for the county in-house. For the most part, the passes are organized by years. Some years are bright and funky. Some are service oriented. Taken together, they showcase the history of Milwaukee—and even reportedly saved a man’s life once. So says Tom Roehl, manager of printing for the Milwaukee County Transit System.”This is utility art, like what you see on the boxtops of cereal boxes,” Roehl says. “No one pays attention to those great artists.”
The Tate has produced a short video about Leonora Carrington, a British artist who became an important part of Surrealist circles in Paris and New York before finally settling in Mexico at the end of her life:
You may know that the Chinese government pays hundreds, if not thousands of people, to leave pro-government comments on websites and blogs around the world. Well, so does Russia, and a recent report on the “troll house” is very enlightening. I can say that Hyperallergic has always suspected that we were being targeted by such organized groups when we wrote about Russia and the Ukraine in the past:
They painted a picture of a work environment that was humourless and draconian, with fines for being a few minutes late or not reaching the required number of posts each day. Trolls worked in rooms of about 20 people, each controlled by three editors, who would check posts and impose fines if they found the words had been cut and pasted, or were ideologically deviant.
The LiveJournal blogger, who spent two months working at the centre until mid-March, said she was paid 45,000 roubles (£520, $790) a month, to run a number of accounts on the site. There was no contract – the only document she signed was a non-disclosure form. She was ordered not to tell her friends about the job, nor to add any of them to the social media accounts she would run under pseudonyms.
… As he spoke decent English, Marat was sent for a test in the English language department, where he was given the task of writing a one-page text in English about his political views. Not wanting to overdo it, he wrote that he was apolitical, and thought all politics were cynical. It was not good enough to pass.
Before he was told he had failed, however, other people in the room were told they had passed the preliminary test and were set to work composing comments on two English-language articles about Ukraine – one by the New York Times and another by CNN.
Just in time for Easter: Allison Murray has created a fun tutorial to paint eggs that look like galaxies. (via Colossal)
The Onion does it again … “Philadelphia Museum Of Art Erects Statue Of Overweight Tourist Posing Next To Rocky Statue“:
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.