• Artnet.com interviews Creative Time curator Nato Thompson on “participatory art,” activism and the new exhibition, Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011. A taste:
I like to use the phrase “socially engaged art,” not to start a new genre but just to refer to people who have some kind of political interest and like to use culture in that. I am not just interested in the visual arts but rather in all facets of culture. That includes realms like architecture and theater, but also things like CAS — community source agriculture — or community gardens. The idea that artists are the only ones that make cultural production is increasingly not the case. These days, almost every kid takes pictures on their iPhone, or has a Flickr account. The idea that only specialized people are photographers is insane. People are culture makers as a way of being in the world, and I think the artistic community is much bigger than people think.
• This Sunday is the Trespass Parade, a celebration of “art, music, and community activism” in Los Agnelese. It’s the culmination of the Trespass project by artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, musician Arto Lindsay and West of Rome Public Art. In a video announcement Tiravanija says shirts by LA-based artists, including John Baldessari and Barbara Kruger, that “reflect the unlimited possibility of free speech” will be for sale.
• MoMA’s de Kooning retrospective is “the most piercing, inexhaustible and relentlessly intense full-on career survey I have ever seen in this country,” writes Jerry Saltz. “It could only be better by being bigger”
• Art:21 looks at what artist and experimental geographer Trevor Paglen — who was in the just-closed Walker show Exposed and will be featured in our forthcoming graphic design show — is reading.
• The Met’s new website, launched Sunday, emphasizes “scholarship and accessibility,” according to director Thomas P. Campbell. The first site redesign in over a decade, it has an interactive museum map and a beefed-up collections section. The Times: “About 340,000 comprehensive entries for objects are included on the revamped site, 200,000 of which have been created over the last nine months.”
• As the Walker preps its own new website, which will be more like a news site than a traditional museum web page, Barcelona’s Latitudes posts every edition of the newspaper it produced in the galleries of the New Museum’s The Last Newspaper last winter. Made up of former Walker curatorial fellow Max Andrews and Mariana Canépa Luna, Latitudes invited former Walker staffers to be involved: designer Chad Kloepfer designed the papers and former curators Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond and former chief curator Richard Flood were among contributors.
• The Barnes Foundation’s controversial move to Philadelphia may have gone against the wishes of its namesake, but the new logo for the museum comes straight from the late Alfred C. Barnes. From Pentagram, which designed the mark:
The identity’s form was suggested by a sketch by Barnes of one of his signature arrangements, a symmetrical row of paintings. Miller recognized the layout as “the DNA of Dr. Barnes’ vision,” a motif that captures the museum’s unique environment and Barnes’ singular view of art. The logo consists of a row of rectangles that recall the centered, axial hanging at the Barnes, each form containing a letter of the museum’s name. The letters play with positive and negative space, referencing the Barnes’ intention to read across works and make connections.
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