Advertising as Faded Art: Frank Jump Explores New York’s Commercialized Yesteryear
Old New York is still all around us, if you know where to look. At least, that's the idea that Frank Jump is selling.
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photography
Mick Rock Shows Off His Pretty, Pretty Pictures at the W
Remember that great Sean John ad Mark Ronson was in 10 years ago? The Observer loved that ad. Sure we could have asked the producer whether married life had changed him, or “what’s next,” but all we really wanted to know was whether it was P. Diddy’s idea or his to let the toothpick dangle so lazily in that print advertisement we once saw ages ago in VIBE. And as electronic rockers Phantogram left the stage of Symmetry Live—the W New York-Downtown’s music concert series—we asked him.
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Your Neighborhood Produce Pushers: MTA Art for Transit Grows Local
Locally grown produce is not what one typically associates with the Atlantic Avenue subway station—the mall food court upstairs is anything but, and the victuals across the street at the Brooklyn Flea is really just fast food for hipsters. Crack pie, anyone?
However, a new photography exhibit by Brooklyn-based photographer Valery Rizzo on display now until December 2012, will decorate the subway walls with vibrant images of mouthwatering legumes, radishes and cucumbers, likely to inspire guilt about Shake Shake cravings and understocked refrigerators. Read More
The New York Times Introduces “Sexy Chicken,” Confusing Everyone
Congratulations are due to New York Times photographer Tony Cenicola for giving us the perfect companion to PETA's upcoming porn site: A seductive, naked chicken (the article is about delicious, delicious skin meat) just asking you to eat it.
So what's the message here?
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Top Ten Museum Shows
Crafting Modernism
Museum of Arts and Design
Oct. 12, 2011 - Jan. 15, 2012
Lest we forget that, as Tom Wolfe so eloquently put it once, this is the “museum formerly known as craft,” the place is putting on a mammoth exhibition devoted to craft, specifically to the relationship between it and design after WWII. This is a fascinating proposal because while craft slowly became a four-letter word during that period, design became uber-fashionable, to the point where, today, it sells to the same crowd that buys Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, and constantly prompts questions like, “Is it design, or is it art?” But forget the concept. Go for the pieces. The show, which is organized by MAD curators Jeannine Falino and Jennifer Scanlan, who are continuing a series of exhibitions presented at the museum in the 1990s, includes stunning pieces by George Nakashima, Isamu Noguchi and many, many others. Read More
Joe Woolhead, the Poet-Photographer of Ground Zero
The World Trace Center site may be the most famous construction project since the Tower of Babel, if not the most contentious.
But most of the work has taken place behind some 13,000 feet of blue construction fencing, and so to the extent that we have watched the progress, we’ve mostly relied on the images sent out from behind the fence—many of them the work of Joe Woolhead. The official photographer for Larry Silverstein and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, he has spent almost every day for the past seven years documenting the slow pace of construction at Ground Zero. If it was not one of his images gracing a magazine spread or appearing in a documentary still, then he almost certainly was helping to guide the lens of Annie Liebowitz, Robert Polidori, NOVA, or Korean news crews—whomever might be parachuting in for a shoot.
No one has spent more time at the World Trade Center site than Joe Woolhead. No one knows it better. To see it through Joe Woolhead’s eyes, or lens, is to witness the halting, hectic, heartfelt transformation of the 16-acre site from ground zero to the World Trade Center, from a warzone back into a workaday corner of the city. Read More
Richard Prince-Patrick Cariou Copyright Suit Revealing Copywrongs
In the case in which art superstar Richard Prince and his agent, megadealer Larry Gagosian, and Mr. Gagosian’s gallery were all found to have jointly infringed the copyrighted images of photographer Patrick Cariou, their appeal of the U.S. District Court’s March decision is having some trouble getting off the ground. That’s because Mr. Cariou has Read More
Ai Weiwei Captures a Bygone New York
Three decades before his arrest and subsequent release last week by the Chinese government incited a media firestorm, Ai Weiwei worked as a Times Square street portraitist. Enrolled at Parsons and living on the Lower East Side, he encountered drug dealers in abandoned buildings, a gritty underground arts scene, and police brutality at Tomkins Square Read More
Tracy Morgan’s Gay Gadfly Has a Sexy New Web Zine
Kevin Rogers, the Nashville-area comedy fan whose heartfelt blog post about Tracy Morgan's homophobic rant was publicized by Truth Wins Out—resulting in a Twitter-storm of outrage, a decision to finally come out to his parents (an hour before appearing on CNN), a knuckle-rapping for Mr. Morgan courtesy of Tina Fey, another Read More
Flash of New Talent: Photography Auctions Embrace Some New Stars
Auctions are nothing if not ruthless. Last week, Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips held multimillion-dollar spring photography sales of a combined 644 images. The results offered clues, as the art market continues to thaw from the 2008 recession, as to which contemporary photographer's stocks have risen, whose have fallen and whose are holding steady post-crash. In Read More
My Artwork Formerly Known as Prince
It wasn't all that long ago that Richard Prince was an artist respected by curators and a few collectors who was largely overlooked by the art market. (He was best known for his 1983 Spiritual America, an unauthorized "re-photograph" of an nude, underage Brooke Shields.) A serious mid-career show at the Whitney in 1992 was Read More
A Talk With Vanity Fair’s Larry Fink, Snapper of Drunken Starlets
What are the ethics, if there are any, of photographing a dead-drunk starlet? Try running that question by Larry Fink. A successful photographer of boxers, jazz musicians and the 1970s Studio 54 scene, he has had retrospectives at MoMA and the Whitney, and a breakthrough well into his career. In 1999, he was lured by Read More
Terry Richardson Zooms In On Justin Bieber for Love Magazine Shoot [PHOTO]
Despite the skeeviness associated with his persona, Terry Richardson's style of photography has become something of a lingua franca in the field. You can see his signature white-wall sexed-up shoots on magazine covers -- like the GQ cover with barely clothed "Glee" kids or, um, James Franco in drag. And although there's no indication Read More
It’s Time to Get Excited for Bill Cunningham New York
There's a film coming in March about Bill Cunningham, unsung hero of curbside couture, peerless photographer, a fashion eye with endless taste and enthusiasm. He's the editor of On The Street, the page in the New York Times Styles section that cobbles together Cunningham's favorite looks that he found while turning his lens on Read More
Love Train: Fusco Snaps From RFK Funeral Voyage, Collected in Book, Show Nation Undivided in 1968
How much of the photographer's art is catching a break and knowing what to do with it? On June 8, 1968, photojournalist Paul Fusco rode the funeral train carrying Robert F. Kennedy from New York to Washington DC. Fusco, then working for LOOK magazine, had been assigned to cover R.F,K.'s funeral at St. Patrick's that Read More
