ABOVE: Detail from Robert Mapplethorpe’s Derrick Cross (1985). A show of Mapplethorpe’s fleshy work was recently allowed to proceed in Cuba.

Last day of ADD abridged, we’ve had our share, drunk our fill, etc.

Canucks getting czech Nazi-loot? — A Canadian family is one step closer to reclaiming 140 paintings stolen by the Nazis when they fled Europe (and currently housed in Czech public galleries). Globe and Mail > Family wins battle in Czech court to reclaim art

Prude or Nude in Cuba? — Mapplethorpe show opens in Cuba after hurdling prudish commie censors. Miami Herald > A famously gay U.S. photographer’s work is exhibited in Havana

Islamic Art goes online — Moroccan museum to open online gallery to show off permanent collection of Islamic art. Morocco Times > Virtual museum on Islamic Art in Oudayas

See you Monday, all systems go as usual.

ABOVE: Dan Rockmore, as profiled in the current issue of Wired. Rockmore is using crazy software to verify the authenticity of Rembrants.

OK, in the second Wired missive this week (we know, we know), we delve ever-deeper into tech geekery, with a profile of Dan Rockmore, a mathematician who is tweaking noses in the lofty world of art appraisal by using computers to scan Rembrandt paintings and digitally break them down into glorified spreadsheets to prove or disprove their authenticity. He says that the intuitive things that appraisers and experts look for—the density, length, direction of a stroke, along with other variables unique to one painter—is really just a big math problem that can be solved with the right software.

Naturally, this has thrown the fear of god into some boffinesque people, who are having visions of their jobs, like so many loyal human employees before them, replaced by a machine. But the stakes are high, and the finances even higher, as the number of genuine Rembrandts, once counted around 700, continues to drop (it’s less than 350 now). As the scarcity rises, prices are going up for the genuine article, so techniques with the whiff of objective, chilly science about them have increasing appeal for collectors with money on the line.

LINK: Wired > The Rembrandt Code

ABOVE: The SMS Guerilla Projector (left) used by the Troika group to cast messages (right) on public—and occasionally private—spaces.

As regular readers will know, we lean pretty strongly toward the “graffiti can be art” perspective, instead of the “graffiti is always and forever vandalism and destruction, and only slightly less punishable than post-office massacres” view. Here’s evidence to the former, for all you not-yet-converts out there. The current issue of Wired includes a feature on graffiti artists working with materials other than aerosolized acrylic and the back walls of 7-11s.

New York artist fi5e uses a projector to instantly throw a tag onto an otherwise unpaintable object, including the archway at Washington Square Park and the side of St. Vincent’s hospital (he was a little miffed because Wired fumbled the terminology in its writeup). The Troika group in London use a self-constructed “guerilla projector” connected to a Nokia cell phone to project text messages up to 80 feet away. And the PIPS:lab art collective in Amsterdam uses a long-exposure photograph and lights of different strengths to allow volunteers to draw in thin air. All of it’s completely engaging, reasonably innovative, and leaves your local 7-11 unscathed.

LINK: Wired > Graffiti Hackers

ABOVE: detail from Laird Hamilton’s Power (2005), which is a picture of the artist’s back and—seriously—comes with an edible strip that tastes like seawater and Hamilton’s skin.

The phrase “there’s no accounting for taste” has seldom been so applicable. The Associated Press has gone nuts for a little temporary gallery set up by Visionaire magazine that features edible taste strips, just like those revolting little Listerene breath strips, except in a rainbow of odd flavours. The magazine took 12 concepts and doled out one each to 12 artists, who provided one artwork and collaborated with International Flavours & Fragrances Inc. on a flavour to go along with it. Tastes include “Art” (adhesive spray and gluestick flavour); “Luxury” (fresh pine cone tips); “Adrenaline” (jet fuel and metal); “Mommy” (condensed milk); and “Life” (fresh soil). Laird Hamilton’s photo, of his own back, is accompanied by a strip that tastes like his back. Ew.

Anyway, the exhibit is in Miami until the end of today and then will reopen in Manhattan in mid-December, where it will remain until the end of February.

LINK: Miami Herald > Exhibit invites visitors to taste art

ABOVE: detail of the new Smithsonian blog, “Eye Level.” Blogger Kriston Capps will write about art in general with the Smithsonian’s formidable catalogue to back him up.

The Smithsonian, the voracious death-star of American cultural heritage (and we mean that in the nicest possible sense) has launched a blog to extend its brand even further online (its website, si.edu, is gargantuan). Blogger Kriston Capps will provide the trenchant insights at Eye Level, which made its hello world entry yesterday. Looking at the site’s colophon, Kriston appears to have—egad—five bosses, from the head of the Smithsonian’s New Media Initiatives all the way up to the Chief Curator. It’s like Lord of the Flies around ADD, so such chain-of-command stuff is alien to us.

The first few entries have touched on the similarities between Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and the paintings of Frederic Church; a look at a stereograph image of the former Patent Office Building that houses the Nat’l Portrait Gallery; and the Native American paintings of George Catlin, and their relationship to the NCAA’s decision to shun aborigine mascots/team names. In other words, a whole lot more professional and informed than the wild slander and dilettantish nonsense we toss around here. Read. Enjoy. But please come back.

LINK: > Eye Level [via DCist]

ABOVE: the print version of semi-venerable art rag The Art Newspaper hasn’t changed much, but its website just received a much-needed update.

The Art Newspaper, the monthly paper which we here at ADD turn to eagerly every issue, has revamped its formerly awful website into something respectable for a publication of its stature. Those of you who frequented the old site will recall that it was a pretty limp imitation of the print version, making no good use of the changeable nature of the medium—like its descendants like ADD, if we do say so ourselves. Anyway, the new site has a section that is updated daily called “Out and About,” the title of which frankly sounds like it was torn from the events page of the Palookaville church bulletin, but that’s immaterial. The front page of the print edition is also availble for download as a PDF, to entice you to purchase the print edition. Not huge developments, but worth going back for, if you weren’t already.

This, by the way, marks the 150th post on Art Digest Daily, an exciting day for us all. Thanks to everyone who’s been reading and linking and, uh, reading some more. See you at 300….

LINK: The Art Newspaper

ABOVE: Detail from Toby Ziegler’s I’m Ready for Love (2002), a “featured work” on the British Council’s new online collection of art. No, not that Toby Ziegler.

The British Council, arbiters of all Britishness, announced yesterday that they will be placing their entire art collection online for the first time. The council is a huge owner of contemporary British art, but since it ships its collection around the world so that lesser peoples may gaze in rapture at the artistic achievements of their betters, the British people themselves rarely get to see the pieces. And since there are over 8,000 items in the collection, showing them off together in the real world is impossible. What to do?

The answer to that question seems to be “put a bunch of grainy scans on a bush-league website that doesn’t work in any browser except Internet Explorer.” The BBC, the Guardian, the Scotsman—all of them published slobbery articles on the Council’s alleged triumph of e-accessibility, but they seem to have been written before the massively disappointing site actually went online: the images of the art are small and low-resolution, and clicking to get the full-size image in a separate window actually produces a bunch of gibberish in Firefox and Safari. The browser incompatibility is pretty embarrassing, but it is nothing compared to the poor quality of the images available. And most of the “recent acquisitions” have no images at all, with a helpful little sign instead reading “Image Not Available.” This is a nice idea that been done in by shabby execution. Uncool, Britannia.

LINK: BBC > British Council art goes online
LINK: British Council Art Collection

ABOVE: detail from Michael Weyhe’s Blue Raindrops (1986), for sale for $300 at BoundlessGallery.com. Artists without established names or little gallery representation are increasingly turning to online galleries to sell their work, says BusinessWeek.

Ever heard of Brown Dwarfs? It’s the name astronomers give to the big gobs of space gas that start to form a star but never really light up. They get good and big, and they’d still totally kill you if you got near enough, but they don’t light up the sky the way true, honest-to-god stars do. In highly competitive fields like art, movies, music, or sport, there are always a few stars and a lot more brown dwarfs. The big names get all the recognition, but they’ve clawed their way to the top of a very large heap of unknowns.

Then came a thing called The Internet, and all of a sudden the nobodies of the world—the philatelists, the scrabble-hounds, the (dare we say it) bloggers—struck out for the unlimited and infinitely divisible super-niches of individual wonkery and electronic togetherness it offered. Artists, for instance, who couldn’t get ten square inches on a legit gallery wall could post ten dozen photos of their latest piece and sell it to a buyer a thousand miles away without ever meeting face to face. This being the art world, of course, there was someone standing by to offer their selling expertise for a modest slice of the proceeds. BusinessWeek points to websites like BoundlessGallery.com, Guild.com, and MyExposé.com that are providing online gallery space for artists who need web representation. The e-galleries are apparently selling more work for their artists and attracting lower-end buyers who wouldn’t normally be art purchasers at all. Welcome to the future.

LINK: BusinessWeek > Art on the Net: The Second Wave

ABOVE: detail from Not a Cornfield, a conceptual art installation growing in Los Angeles throughout the month of September.

It’s been a good year for huge artistic interventions in public spaces, what with The Gates clogging New York, the opening of Millennium Park in Chicago, the new Lichtenstein sculpture in Philadelphia, and now, the much quieter but equally important Not a Cornfield project in Los Angeles. Not a Cornfield is, uh, a cornfield—32 acres of corn growing in an abandoned rail yard near L.A.’s chinatown district. The $3 million project, the brainchild of L.A. artist Lauren Bon, was planted in late July and will be harvested in October, leaving the site ready for construction of a park that the California State Parks system has been threatening to build for decades (naturally, it’s never been built).

Some residents have chafed at Not a Cornfield’s $3 million price tag, but keep in mind that that amount paid for the 1,500 truckloads of soil to plant the 875,000 corn seeds in, and the irrigation equipment to water them. The rail yard will be turned from industrial brownfield to arable land, and everyone in the neighbourhood will have enjoyed 3 months of Aboriginal drum ceremonies, free lectures and discussions, and film screenings. Sounds cheaper and more engaging than most public works projects, if you ask us. The L.A. Times talked to people who seemed enchanted and those who just missed the point, but Not a Cornfield, for all its crunchy-granola pedigree, sounds like it connects with people on a way more personal level than the chilly intellectual hauteur of Christo et al. You can watch the corn grow—seriously—on Not a Cornfield’s webcam.

LINK: L.A. Times > ‘Not a Cornfield’ Idea Is Food for Thought

ABOVE: Detail from William Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar (1795), called one of the ten worst paintings in Britain by a panel of experts for the Guardian.

So last week while the BBC was gathering stones together (turn, turn turn), the Guardian was casting them away, (turn, turn, turn) assembling a crack team of misanthropic art wonks to choose the worst paintings in Britain. The whole thing quite succinctly demolishes the entirely vapid and arbitrary contest that the BBC is running with the National Gallery to choose the Greatest Painting in Britain.

The assembled team don’t pull their punches, either, as we felt was best demonstrated by by Sir Timothy Clifford, director general of the National Galleries of Scotland at Edinburgh: “We have been bequested eight paintings by Monticelli, each one more hideous than the last,” he is quoted as saying. “In my 21 years here, none has been hung because I think Monticelli produces screamingly awful art.” And another demolition expert, on The Blind Girl: “This is mawkish Victorian sentimentality at its worst. The butterflies are especially nauseating.” Ah, culture.

LINK: The Guardian > Ten of the Worst

Missed this a few days ago when they officially went online, but the expanding web empire of MoCoLoco, the online web magazine of “modern contemporary” design and decor, has started another website, ArtMoCo, to focus on MoCo art.

Must be something about spring: quite aside from the launch of ADD itself in February, there was the launch of Artkrush just last week. Anyway, there’s enough room for all of us, so make room in your browser for another bookmark.

Art MoCo - Modern contemporary design & architecture

ABOVE: two of Richard McGuire’s new narrative-driven spot drawings for The New Yorker

This probably wasn’t keeping anyone awake at night, but did anyone else not know that The New Yorker had been reprinting those little drawings throughout the magazine on a six-month rotation? This piece from the New York Times quotes editor David Remnick: “We’ve been running some of the same windmills, toasters, umbrellas and shoes in six-month rotation for a long time.”

Anyway, no more: with its 80th anniversary issue on February 18, the magazine has turfed out the old collection of tiny doodles that appear throughout its pages, and replaced them with new ones by some new artists. And no longer are they random line-drawings of hats or flowers—now they have narratives attached, and come in series of six to ten, so you get a progression of the little story as you read.

These drawings are probably not leading to huge paydays for the artists who draw them, but it’s nice to see The New Yorker giving people some work to do. The Times story also includes a slideshow of one of the new doodle series.

The New York Times > Talk of the Town (Make That Whisper)

ABOVE: detail from Subodh Gupta’s Everybody is Inside, appearing in issue #01 of Artkrush

The people who put out hepster must-read e-newsletter Flavorpill have announced a new bi-weekly newsletter called ArtKrush, which will cover the international art world with the same heady mix of insider condescension and proletarian enthusiasm that makes their other e-pistolary so helpful and entertaining to read.

And like all good opt-in self-spam, it’s free to subscribe.

ArtKrush: Issue # 01

ABOVE: Lucia Matthews’s Screen (circa 1910-15), on display starting March 17 at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Opening in just over a week at the Victoria & Albert Museum is a mammoth exhibit on the International Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, when everyone got very spooked out by motorcars and smokestacks and electric toasters and decided that individual, handmade items were best. The exhibit is spread out over five floors and almost a dozen galleries, encompassing several decades and three continents. The exhibit argues that Arts and Crafts helped to shape the world as we know it today, influencing architecture, industrial design, and modern art. But quick—check how many pieces of furniture in your current surroundings came from IKEA; it’s more than four, they’ll make you pay extra to see this show.

The V&A has put together a website to go along with the exhibit, so you can see some of the pieces even if you happen to be stuck on the wrong side of the pond. The show opens on March 17.

V & A | International Arts & Crafts

ABOVE: Orange (1923), by Vasily Kandinsky, one of the thousands of images newly available through the New York Public Library’s online collection.

As of March 3, the New York Public Library is making its digital online collection of photographs, prints, maps, and assorted other biblio-ephemera available free to the general public—until today you would have had to be using a NYPL computer terminal to get access.

As this New York Times article points out, the collection is not the easiest to search effectively, but with a few swings at the interface you can boogie down with your boolean self. Every image is available free for personal use, so you can take what you like as long as you’re using it for your private edification.

The site was moving a little sluggishly this morning from all us cyber-tourists crowding in, but New Yorkers are no strangers to gawking provincials, right?

NYPL Digital Library