Archive for the 'Graffiti' Category

Miscellany. 01.30.12.

By c-monster on January 31, 2012 in C-Monster, Graffiti, Luna Park, Miscellany and New York. 2 Comments


Ayre and Yok in Manhattan. (Photo by Luna Park.)

On Public Housing

A view of the Marcy Houses. (Photo by NYC-Metrocard.)

Michael Kimmelman has an interesting piece about large-scale housing developments in the New York Times. He takes a look at the fate of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe projects in St. Louis and draws a comparison to the Penn South buildings in New York’s Chelsea, which have been largely successful as a housing development. He discusses how economic and other urban development factors can affect the success or failure of architectural design. All around an interesting piece. But while I dig Kimmelman’s focus on publicly-minded design (a breath of fresh air after Ourossoff’s era of mega-projects), it seems like a bit of an oversight to pen a very long story about these types of constructions and not even mention places like the Marcy Houses in Bed-Stuy or Red Hook Houses in Red Hook — two places with a history that is infinitely less rosy than that of Penn South.

Linkage

  • In an essay in Vanity Fair, Kurt Anderson says we are in a period of cultural stasis — relentlessly remixing everything that came before, but not necessarily adding anything new: “In our Been There Done That Mashup Age, nothing is obsolete, and nothing is really new; it’s all good. I feel as if the whole culture is stoned, listening to an LP that’s been skipping for decades, playing the same groove over and over. Nobody has the wit or gumption to stand up and lift the stylus.” Sure explains a lot of the art I see…
  • Holy Shit: Dude surfing a 90-foot wave.
  • Interesting essay in the Atlantic on how much information is too much for Google to have.
  • Bytebeats: music from the programming language C.
  • That point where Tony Curtis and Christopher Wool intersect.
  • A proposed turn-of-the-20th-century reconstruction of the Venus de Milo. Amazing and weird. (@giovannigf.)
  • The New York Observer profiles the life and times of artist and ArtNet editor Walter Robinson.
  • And the Wall Street Journal mag takes on Anne Pasternak, the director of Creative Time.
  • The Day in Art Merch: Private jets decorated with graffiti by RETNA.
  • Plus, speaking of airplane graffiti: The Boneyard Project. Making airplane hulls all pretty-like.
  • There’s nothing like a book review that revels in a little dismemberment: Heather Havrilesky on Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land. Yowza. (@embeedub)
  • “The main thing to remember is the sunlight, and the immense expanse of sky and earth that it illuminates: it sucks the color out of everything that it touches, takes the green out of leaves and the sap out of twigs, makes human beings seem small and of no importance.” — Mystery writer James Cain, on California in the 1930s.
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Tahrir Square: Recent graffiti.

By c-monster on November 17, 2011 in C-Monster, Graffiti and Street Art. 1 Comment


My friend Baghdad Bobby is currently running around Egypt on assignment and he sent me a few pictures of the graffiti in Tahrir Square in Cairo that I find rather inspiring. Above: pawns defeat the king.


I like the digital reference on this one. It means “Power to the People.”

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Stone Age: Graffiti carvings in Central Park.

By c-monster on October 30, 2011 in C-Monster, Graffiti, New York and Street Art. 1 Comment

My partner-in-crime, Celso, was running around Central Park’s North Woods when he stumbled into this (uncommissioned) carving of a face on a rock. I like the Olmec head aspirations and that someone decided to carve (rather than spray) one of the park’s boulders. If you’re the artist and you’re reading this: keep up the good work. (Photo by celso_nyc.)

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Miscellany. 10.24.11.

By c-monster on October 24, 2011 in C-Monster, Graffiti and Miscellany. 7 Comments


CES53 in the Netherlands. (Via Ekosystem.)

On Occupy Art Museums
There’s been a lively debate online about the whole Occupy Museums protest (starting with Karen Archey’s piece on ArtInfo, Will Brand’s rebuttal in Art Fag City and Hyperallergic‘s follow-up here). As is usually the case, I’m not in 100% agreement with anybody. But I did want to speak out about the blanket way in which the word “museums” seems to be identified with institutions such as MoMA and the Gugg. Those institutions are more the exception than the rule, cultural juggernauts connected to the super powerful. But there are countless other smaller, community-minded institutions — places like El Museo del Barrio, the Bronx Museum, the Queens Museum, teaching museums like the Vincent Price and the Fowler, places that show the kinds of artists that never get seen anywhere else. There’sa lot of grey in this debate. Personally, if there’s one area of the art world that I think needs occupation it’s the art fairs. I can’t think of an atmosphere that’s less amenable to art and ideas than those overpriced flea markets.

Random Linkage

  • “The wealth of resources we apply to entertainment serves only to shield us from the poverty of the product.” —Tony Judt, on austerity.
  • Britain’s draconian visa procedures for artists is making U.S. customs enforcement look warm and fuzzy. (Alec Soth wasn’t allowed to take pictures on his last visit.) Criticismism has a story about the arbitrary nature of the process.
  • The rise of the robot writer.
  • This story about the growing use of emoticons is fucking hilarious: “If anybody on Facebook sends me a message with a little smiley-frowny face or a little sunshine with glasses on them, I will de-friend them. I also de-friend for OMG and LOL. They get no second chance.” LOL.
  • “I attribute my salvation to books.” Reading American literature in Castro’s Cuba.
  • I love nothing more than a Shakespeare scholar on a tear. Though I will say that the bong joke is a low blow. #StonersArePeopleToo.
  • Love digging up old stories on the internetz, such as this 1993 New York Times article about “The Art World Bust.” The piece is entertaining all around (and strangely relevant). But my favorite bit has to be the quote from Julian Schnabel’s assistant, to Deborah Solomon of the Times, who was seeking an interview: “Julian says he doesn’t have the mind space to think about your questions. He’s busy with renovations.”
  • Bruce Davidson’s subway shots.
  • Infected needles. Chimpanzee-to-human scrotum transplants. And the Haitian secret police chief who was known as the “Vampire of the Caribbean.” An absolutely amazing story about how AIDS came to be.
  • The Art of Film Criticism: The New Yorker rounds up five classic Pauline Kael reviews.
  • Today’s Graff: Escif, in France.
  • Awwccupy Wall Street. Plus: Writer Caleb Crain, on why he signed the Occupy Wall Street petition.
  • Nice profile of Esther McCoy, the “mother” of Southern California architecture writing.
  • Speaking of which, I’m insanely jealous that Edward Lifson got to spend the day inside Rudolf Schindler’s Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach, Calif.
  • The Day in Art Merch: Guggenheim house paint. For serious.
  • The Art of Letterhead.
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C-Mon Giveaway Extravaganza: Graffiti Edition.

By c-monster on October 3, 2011 in C-Monster, Giveaway and Graffiti. 44 Comments

Hey Folks:

This is a good one. The kind folks at Abrams have given me five (yes, five!) copies of Jay Edlin’s Graffiti 365 for giveaway on the blog. This is a hardback doozy (it retails for $32.50), clocking in at more than 700 pages and weighing as much as a small boar. It’s an excellent compendium of graffiti and street art: an exhaustive alphabetical gathering of the movement’s players, large and small, with lots of pictures to boot.

Leave a comment below and you could be one of five very lucky people.

xox,
C.

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Miscellany. 09.30.11.

By c-monster on September 30, 2011 in C-Monster, Graffiti and Miscellany. 1 Comment


Bonus, in Buffalo. Love the choners. (Photo by celso_nyc.)

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Miscellany. 09.19.11.

By c-monster on September 19, 2011 in C-Monster, Graffiti, Miscellany, Peru and Street Art. 1 Comment


Miraflores graffiti, by Ultraclay! (Find more of his stuff here and here.)

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Miscellany. 08.22.11.

By c-monster on August 23, 2011 in C-Monster, Graffiti and New York. Closed


Smells, reflected, in NYC. (Image courtesy of BruceLaBounty802.)

From a story on the slipping American Middle Class
“Over time, the United States has expected less and less of its elite, even as society has oriented itself in a way that is most likely to maximize their income. The top income-tax rate was 91 percent in 1960, 70 percent in 1980, 50 percent in 1986, and 39.6 percent in 2000, and is now 35 percent. Income from investments is taxed at a rate of 15 percent. The estate tax has been gutted.” — More in The Atlantic.

And America’s Hero Complex
“’America needs heroes,’ it is sometimes said, a phrase that’s often uttered in a wistful tone, almost cooingly, as if we were talking about a lonely child. But do we really ‘need heroes’? We need leaders, who marshal us to the muddle. We need role models, who show us how to deal with it. But what we really need are citizens, who refuse to infantilize themselves with talk of heroes and put their shoulders to the public wheel instead. The political scientist Jonathan Weiler sees the cult of the uniform as a kind of citizenship-by-proxy. Soldiers and cops and firefighters, he argues, embody a notion of public service to which the rest of us are now no more than spectators. What we really need, in other words, is a swift kick in the pants.” — From a must-read by William Deresiewicz in the New York Times Opinion section.

Random Linkage

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Miscellany. 07.22.11.

By c-monster on July 22, 2011 in C-Monster, Graffiti and Miscellany. Closed


Gore-B, protecting today’s perishables for tomorrow. (Image courtesy of Gore-B.)

American Graffiti

Eric Thayer's photo of L.A. graffiti in the New York Times.

The New York Times has a story about the oh-so-scary rise in graffiti. I’d love to spend more time dissecting this, but unfortunately I’m slammed with work. Thankfully, Joerg Colberg pointed me to this vey smart essay over at No Caption Needed, which does just that. In it, Robert Hariman argues that the main issue with this story (and in so many others like this) is that it throws the problem at the feet of the culture industry, without bothering to examine any of the other causes that might lead to an uptick in graffiti:

In what may appear to be sophisticated coverage, the Times reports that ‘The upturn has prompted concern among city officials and renewed a debate about whether glorifying such displays — be it in museum exhibits, tattoos, or television advertisements — contributes to urban blight and economic decay.’ And there, in a stroke, we have it: The Times channeling Fox News. The leading explanation faults culture, not economics or politics, and suggests that a culture war is underway and the rightful center of public debate, and that the real danger comes from curators and other liberals who promote transgression in the arts…

The essay is all kinds of excellent, so please click through and read it. But I will add a couple of thoughts: One, we live in a period where there is less arts education ever. Where we choose to spend our funds on grotesquely punitive measures against graffiti, rather than providing people with alternative outlets for art. We also live in a time in which our public spaces are wallpapered with advertising (a lot of it illegal). In other words: the corporations get to talk to us, but we never get to talk back. Most irritating is the fact that the story’s accompanying slideshow features legal graffiti-inspired murals — but fails to identify them as such. (The photos also fetishize graffiti to the max.) Lastly, the story provides absolutely no historical context: the urge to paint walls is as old as civilization and, perhaps, even predates it.

The fact is, that as long as people have something to say (even if its for blatantly commercial reasons — like getting a sneaker deal), then people are gonna paint on walls. I agree, graffiti is not always aesthetically pleasing. But maybe, just maybe, we should simply learn to live with it.

Strange Tech
A collar that chokes, a menstruation machine and bacteria that colors your poops. I have a piece up at Techland on the five most bizarre piece at MoMA’s new tech show, Talk to Me. (Which, by the way, is all kinds of excellent.) Please click through!

Random Linkage

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Miscellany. 06.13.11.

By c-monster on June 13, 2011 in C-Monster, Graffiti, Italy and Miscellany. 1 Comment


Train graffiti in Italy makes a visual reference to the country’s current nuclear power referendum, the first of its kind. (Photo by fabrye.)

Ai Weiwei’s Detention
I feel like I’ve been uncharacteristically silent on artist Ai Weiwei’s imprisonment by the Chinese government, partially because the news of what happened caught me while I was on the road. The short of it is that Ai’s detention is now entering its third month and blogs such as Art City, Eyeteeth, Modern Art Notes and Hyperallergic have been covering the hell out of the story, so read them!

Image courtesy of Akmezero4

Naturally, a lot of the talk is about how U.S. museums and other Western cultural institutions should deal with China’s imprisonment of Ai, a figure who has been a vocal critic of his government’s corruption, censorship and negligence. (The government is accusing him of tax evasion.) Certainly, I think it’s important to have powerful institutions protest Ai’s detainment, as well as the imprisonment of countless other intellectuals, writers and activists. Keeping pressure on the Chinese government from all angles is key. But I also think we each have a personal connection to what’s happening, supporting an oppressive regime by slavishly purchasing the goods that come out of the country, be it the latest, hottest iWhatever or the bounty of pressed wood furniture that lines our living rooms. Even the rebel flag shot glasses that clutter so many gas stations in a wide swath of our country are…made in China. Yes, it’s significant that our cultural institutions protest Ai’s detainment. But I wonder how effective these condemnations can be as long as we continue to support such an oppressive regime with our wallets.

My 15 Nanoseconds of Fame

Cruising in Brooklyn

I made it onto Google Street View while riding my bike in the vicinity of the Brooklyn Museum. (Full disclosure: I saw the Google car and followed it for a few of blocks because that’s the kind of cheap, internet fame whore I am. Sorry, Joerg.) The whole thing inspired me to look up some of the addresses I’d lived in over the course of my life on GSV— the vast majority of which aren’t online because my family had a penchant for inhabiting incredibly bizarre, out-of-the-way places. It was a trip back in time, except it wasn’t, because I’m seeing all of these spots in the pseudo-present. (A selection: the place I was born in, the road leading to the house we lived in when I was 10, the donut shop where I used to ditch high school English class and the college dorm that was the site of various inebriated indiscretions.) Which brings me to this highly interesting essay — which I discovered by way of Conscientious — about photography in the age of GSV.

Random Linkage

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