Hrag Vartanian
Hayri Atak
Architectural Design Studio has designed a concept for a boutique hotel within
a cliff edge in Norway that includes a cantilevered glass swimming pool and
it’s impressive. More images at Dezeen (via Dezeen)
Artist Sam Gilliam
was featured in the New York Times and people couldn’t help but notice his new
representation:
Considered a master
in the third wave of Color Field painters, Mr. Gilliam has spent much of his
career in Washington, where he first started to experiment with unsupported
canvases. His signature draped and beveled-edge paintings, which are suspended
from the ceiling or stretched across beveled frames, were considered a radical
reimagining of the medium. In 1972, he became the first black artist to
represent the United States at the Venice Biennale.
Yet, despite his
early success, Mr. Gilliam has never been represented by a New York gallery.
Arne Glimcher, the founder of Pace Gallery, attributed that to the artist’s
nonconformist sensibility, saying the artist has “really steered his own career
and steered it clear of what we know as the art market.”
A good explainer on
how rich people use art as an asset class. It’s all quite gross, but, as you
can imagine, the 1%-ers of the art world and their courtiers love it:
The target market is
gallery owners who need inventory financing and wealthy collectors without
private banking services who might want to indulge themselves with more art —
or have more prosaic concerns. Snyder describes one potential borrower as a guy
“who had a big tax bill and said, ‘Geez, I don’t want to sell anything, but
I’ve got to pay the tax.’”
Snyder said he has
been the largest investor in the fund while 25 others have bought in, with a
minimum investment set at $100,000, well below the $500,000 minimum of a typical
hedge fund. “You don’t have to be Richard Branson,” he says proudly.
John Waters talks
about working at poet Mary Oliver’s bookshop in the Provincetown of the 1960s:
John Waters: When I
worked for Mary Oliver and Molly Malone, I could only work when it rained
because that’s when the stores got crowded in Provincetown. Wherever I was, if it started raining, I’d run to work. They also said I
could take any book for free if I sold them. It was so smart, because this was
in the 60s when everybody stole everything, so I didn’t steal. Also, I read
everything and that’s how I got my education. It was like going to college . .
. since I didn’t even go to school. I learned from working there, yet I sold
all the books I read and liked. It was worth it. It was a really smart thing to
do, from a management’s viewpoint.
Ai Weiwei says he supports the Hong Kong
protests and challenges artists in the city to be more assertive about their
creative rights:
Ai: I have had some art activity in Hong Kong.
It is a society with a special, modern energy. At the same time, I do feel that
art in Hong Kong should be much more aggressive or make a more global impact.
Hong Kong still benefits from being the most international city in Asia. It has a strongly
educated population. The city needs more art that reflects its energy, hope,
and imagination.
Myke Cole writes
about the Sparta death cult of the global fascist movements, and like most
myths, it’s based on some half-truths:
The Spartans,
popular wisdom tells us, were history’s greatest warriors; in fact, they lost
battles frequently and decisively. We are told they dominated Greece; they
barely managed to scrape a victory in the Peloponnesian Wars with wagonloads of
Persian gold, and then squandered their hegemony in a single year. We hear they
murdered weak or deformed children, though one of their most famous kings had a
club foot. They preferred death to surrender, as the legend of the Battle of
Thermopylae is supposed to show—even though 120 of them surrendered to the
Athenians at Sphacteria in 425 B.C.E. They purportedly eschewed decadent wealth
and luxury, even though rampant inequality contributed to oliganthropia, the
manpower shortage that eventually collapsed Spartan military might. They are
assumed to have scorned personal glory and lived only for service to the
city-state, despite the fact that famous Spartans commissioned poetry, statues,
and even festivals in their own honor and deliberately built cults of
personality. They all went through the brutal agōgē regimen of warrior
training, starting from age seven—but the kings who led their armies almost
never endured this trial. They are remembered for keeping Greece free from
foreign influence, but in fact they allied with, and took money from, the very
Persians they fought at Thermopylae.
While considering
the black and political history of techno music author Andy Beta writes:
Hearing about techno
as it was originally conceived—as a reaction to inner-city decay, as byproduct
of African-American struggle, as a form of protest — served as a crucial
reminder of the roots of this dance music, and that the name Underground
Resistance was in no way a euphemism, but a reality. To the outsider — in this
writer’s case, a white teen from the suburbs of Texas — it might be hard to
conceive of the oft-wordless techno as revolutionary music; by the time I
started hearing it in the early ‘90s, it certainly wasn’t the relentless sound
of Underground Resistance. At that nascent stage, Detroit techno (and Chicago
house) was being packaged and presented as the smiley-face music of Berlin,
Madchester, and Belgium — the sound of Europeans and Ecstasy. Rather than
Marshall Jefferson’s “Move Your Body”, my generation was instead indoctrinated
with its Belgian rewrite, Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam”. Even then, techno’s
blunt force was being lightened.
A Vanity Fair
investigation reveals how Saudi Arabia attempts to abduct, repatriate—and
sometimes murder—citizens it regards as enemies of the state:
Through interviews
on three continents with more than 30 individuals—activists, national security
experts, relatives of the forcibly disappeared, and American, European, and
Middle Eastern government officials—a clearer picture has emerged about the
extent to which Saudi authorities have gone to imprison, repatriate, and even
murder countrymen who dare to protest the kingdom’s policies or somehow malign
the image of the nation. On these pages are the stories of eight recent
abductees—and those of four others who managed to elude capture—part of a
systematic program that goes far beyond the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. The
Saudi campaign is ruthless and relentless. And it has more similarities with,
say, the codes of a crime syndicate than it does with those of a traditional,
modern-era ally of the United States of America.
The International
Labour Organization has adopted a new treaty protecting people from violence
and harassment at work:
You mentioned #MeToo
before – was this work in response to that movement?
This was already in
the works when the #MeToo movement started. But it started at an opportune time
for us because we were able to say: “You can’t say these things are not
happening. It’s all over the media.”
How Gazans eat while
their territory is under siege:
Today half of Gaza’s
population live in poverty and two-thirds either can’t afford or don’t have
access to nutritious food in sufficient quantities. More than half are
unemployed. To cope, local women say they buy cheap foods in small quantities,
often with borrowed money, and cook it over firewood. Saad sends me a photo of
her fridge: it is mostly empty, the few items on the shelves melting or rotting
because of power outages.
Saad’s husband is
employed by the Palestinian National Authority, the body that has governed Gaza
since 1994, and works in public health. His salary has been cut but because he
has a job his family receives no food aid. They live pay cheque to pay cheque,
yet Saad considers her family is among the lucky ones. She plans the rare costly dish ingredient by ingredient, she says. This
week she has makhshi koosa in her sights: fried magda squash stuffed with
spiced ground beef and pine-nuts in a fresh tomato sauce. She will buy the
vegetables, then wait until she has the money to buy a little beef. “Maybe
Friday…”
This is just
incredible:
Ethiopia Plants 350
Million Trees in One Day to Combat Drought
Every wonder why
mailing addresses in the borough of Queens don’t just read Queens, NY, like
Brooklyn, and other boroughs? Gothamist has your explainer:
Queens had an
overall bumpy transition to borough-hood. There was resistance to consolidation
on several fronts: for instance, Patrick “Battle Axe” Gleason, the mayor of
Long Island City who had failed in his bid to become mayor of the newly
enlarged New York, decided the merger was unconstitutional and refused to leave
office. And the new Borough of Queens consisted of only half of the old Queens
County; for a year, the two jurisdictions awkwardly overlapped, with the county
government having no real authority over the city portion, where the majority
of its population lived. (The rural rump was eventually reorganized into Nassau
County.) That lack of a coherent pre-consolidation Queens identity, most people
will tell you, is why those original towns and villages are still used as names
by the Postal Service.
There’s a few
wrinkles in this explanation. The first is that Queens wasn’t the only county
full of smaller divisions to join New York in 1898. The Bronx didn’t have any
sort of pre-consolidation unity, not even as a county: the western portion had
been grafted onto New York from Westchester County even before consolidation,
in 1874, when it became known as “the Annexed District”; only after another
chunk of the Westchester had been gobbled up in 1898 did the mainland portion
of the city come together as a distinct separate entity. Staten Island was
divided into five different towns at the time of consolidation; as late as
1929, the Harvard Alumni Directory gave Staten Island addresses that included
the name of an individual community (e.g., “73 Miles Ave., Great Kills, Staten
Island, NY”), which you would never see written out that way today.
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