When I was still a student at Simon Fraser University the city and working at The Peak I managed to get my hands on a copy of plans for the Woodward’s development a full year before the official announcement that the SFU School for Contemporary Arts would make a home there.
I’ll admit, I snuck it from the student union offices because I’m nosey and have to know everything. But what I saw made me excited. Excited that the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU would FINALLY have a home that wasn’t a set of trailers placed helter skelter behind campus. Excited that they’d be getting a real home after 40 years of promises. Excited even though I wasn’t a contemporary arts student.
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This post originally appeared on Hyperallergic.
It’s impossible to escape the heated rhetoric around Park51 in lower Manhattan. The proposed community center for some of the city’s Muslim population has been called everything from the Ground Zero Mosque, which is the preferred term of the right wing media, to labels more appealing to the left, such as the Cordoba Center — though the developer prefers to call it Park51. No matter your political preference, the fact is you probably have an opinion about the issue.
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It has begun! In late August, a group – or project – calling itself the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover (TOSAT) reclaimed 41 advertising posts and about 25 larger billboards in the city of Toronto.
The “interventions” included painting over, pasting over and replacing advertising kiosk images with artwork and anti-consumer and anti-advertising graphic images from more than 60 international artists. Approximately 90 individual ads were “reclaimed”.
The takeover was orchestrated by 15 local artists lead by Jordan Seiler, a New York City–based street artist, well-known for his similar 2009 reclamation project in New York. The group was briefed on how to gain access to the kiosks and then issued a make-believe letter of permission from an advertising company stating that the company had “graciously donated over 20 Core Media Pillars to the Municipal Landscape Control Committee public arts program division,” among other fictional things. The kiosks were targeted in a 2-hour period on a Sunday afternoon; billboards were reclaimed later that night.
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In the wake of the recent racist attack on a Muslim cab driver in NYC, I’m particularly interested in the public reaction to the latest project by Tehran-born, Big Apple-based artist Amir Baradaran. For one week beginning September 9, Baradaran will debut Transient, a series of 40-second video installations infiltrating New York’s taxicabs.
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Glenn Beck helped cement his reputation as a misinformed art critic today during his massive right-wing “Restoring Honour” rally, which was disturbingly organized on the anniversary — and in the exact location — of Martin Luther King’s historic “Dream” speech.
Perched in front of 300,000 monochromatic faces, Beck gave an architecture lesson concerning the design of the Washington Monument. The story is retold beautifully by L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight, who goes on to explain the ironic hilarity of Beck’s latest folly.
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The first official visit by UK Prime Minister Cameron to the White House on July 20, 2010 was watched closely by political pundits around the world. They both wore blue ties during their meeting — did this signify unity on foreign affairs? Was their body language cold or comfortable? Did they walk in stride? During their visit the media analyzed every move, but it was the traditional gift exchange that took the world by storm.
President Obama presented the Prime Minister with a signed lithograph by the famed American pop artist Ed Rucha. In exchange, the Prime Minister presented Obama with a graffiti canvas painted by UK tagger-turned-street artist Eine. With this simple gift, Cameron had instantly challenged conventions and redefined the boundaries of contemporary art.
The media have since described Cameron’s gift as an ‘eyebrow-raising gift of hoodie art’ whilst others have referred to the exchange as a ‘refinement and sophistication of transatlantic relations’ and having ‘established new heights of greatness in meaningful diplomatic gift-giving.’ But more than anything, the exchange has reignited the classic debate: is it art?
The success of prolific street artists such as Banksy and Os Gemos have catapulted street art into the spotlight in recent years resulting in evening art auctions and exhibits in prestigious galleries including the Tate Modern.
For years, seen as only vandalism, the scene has now been set to re-evaluate graffiti’s merit as an art form. But while the art world has been able to reflect upon this difficult aesthetic question, government authorities have been slower to change.
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Graffiti artist Blu strikes a chord in his home country with a new giant mural in Grottaglie, Italy, famous for its olive trees, ancient ceramic tradition and new, ever-expanding waste dumps. As the artist’s contribution to FAME Fest, a yearly event inviting top urban artists to create street and gallery works, Blu chose to highlight the town’s growing problem with his work É Pronta la Torta (The Cake is Ready).
“Southern Italy is in real deep shit with the trash business. Grottaglie did not need the dump at all and people in town were not given any warning before it was already being built. Guess how come? Now we have trash coming from very far away and the dump seems to get bigger and bigger, there already are three huge lots full of trash and trucks get here daily from Northern Europe to deliver more shit.
This piece comes at the very right moment, considering that there are workers digging another huge hole in the ground near the dump. There are reasons to believe that they are going to create a fourth lot and again, our formidable town councilors are not telling anything to their own people. How morbid is this?” – FAME Fest founder Angelo Milano
Visit this site for additional images and info about Blu’s mural, and check out the award winning film Gomorrah to get a glimpse of the severity and situation surrounding Southern Italy’s toxic dumping problem.
