Art Fag City at The L Magazine: Regarding Regarding Warhol: It Sucks!

What’s better for cocktail party conversation: a trip to the The Metropolitan Museum to see the exhibition or a trip to a couple out-of-the-way shows you might actually like? I did both recently; this week, we’ll focus on the Met—because high-profile flops are generally great for party chatter.

Aside from The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl, basically every critic in the city has panned Regarding Warhol. That’s for good reason. Curators Mark Rosenthal, Marla Prather, Ian Alteveer, and Rebecca Lowery have assembled a conceptually empty show around the idea that Warhol has influenced the art world’s biggest stars—especially the long list of them included in this show.

Flamers: Political Art and The Critics

This week, critics hated on critics, political art, the art market, and Diego Singh. The biggest flamer’s reserved for “La Boheme” at the Opera Company of Philadelphia, which apparently does little more than prompt sea sickness.

Philip Morris Orders Artist Brad Troemel to Cease and Desist

Philip Morris does not want its cigarette cartons used as art. The mega-corporation has today accused artist Brad Troemel of trademark infringement for using Marlboro products in his online Etsy store.

#Longreads: The Surprisingly Old Art of Photo Fakery

“You can do anything in photography if you can get away with it.” wrote Paul Strand, a photographer who in 1915, painted out a figure that cluttered the composition of “City Hall Park.” That quote appears somewhere in the middle of Dushko Petrovich’s essay on the history of digital photography, and I love it. It speaks to the philosophy that the quality of the image should dictate its form, which even in the context of image manipulation, is its own kind of artistic purity

Ai Weiwei Does Gangnam Style

Do we even need to explain this?  Gangnam Style, Ai Weiwei style.

Art Fag City at The L Magazine: Cybersquatting For Fame

This spring, wandering around the mini sculpture park at Frieze New York, I noticed a tiny canvas propped against the back of one of the expensive steel cubes. I don’t remember what was painted on it—based on that, I’ll guess geometric abstraction—but the attached business card indicated it was the work of some not-yet-famous artist seeking a bit of free publicity. I liked the spirit of the thing, but I still had work to do, and I figured walking around an art fair with a canvas under one arm wouldn’t please security. Still, there’s some wisdom in bringing your art to collectors, rather than waiting for them to come to you.

That’s something of the thinking of La Fin du Monde, an online show curated by Julien Levesque and Caroline Delieutraz up now at LaFIAC.com. The exhibition venue is a cybersquat, established in 2010, intended to catch visitors looking for FIAC, the major Paris-based art fair this weekend. Instead of the fair, they’ll find a clever, fairly encyclopedic exhibition of recent net art, ranging from established continental artists like Mouchette and Systaime to relatively fresh faces like Emilie Gervais and Sarah Weis.

New York Goes to Texas: The Texas Contemporary Art Fair

There’s plenty of reasons for starting an art fair, but you rarely hear the line about non-profits yearning for one. That’s the story behind the Texas Contemporary Art Fair which gets underway this week at Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center (which intentionally looks like a big boat). Run by Brooklyn-based artMRKT Productions, the fair looks impressive, and reflects its growing reputation in the contemporary art world.

MoMA’s “The Scream” Opens Today

After becoming the most expensive artwork of all time, “The Scream” gets its own show at MoMA for six months.

Times Square Might Get a Massive Art Exhibition

A kickstarter campaign proposes an art exhibition, curated by Hyperallergic’s Hrag Vartanian, to take over the billboards in Times Square.