• Lu Qing is urging Chinese legislators to reject a proposed measure that’d legalize the kind of detention her husband, dissident artist Ai Weiwei, endured. Changes to the Criminal Procedure Code would OK imprisonment of citizens in secret locations without contact with family. “If the above measures are passed, it will be a regression for China’s legal system, the deterioration of human rights, and will be a hindrance to the progress of our civilization,” Lu wrote to a committee in the National People’s Congress. “(When) a citizen is taken away by a public security arm, a notice to the family members is the most basic right.”
• Sculptor Oliviero Rainaldi is getting a second shot at a sculpture of Pope John Paul II. Some critics said the work, a 16-foot bronze piece installed outside Rome’s main train station, looked more like Mussolini than the late pontiff.
• The day in gore: While photos of the late Michael Jackson on a gurney came out in the trial of his physician, the White House is urging a court to reject a Freedom of Information Act request that’d make public 52 “gruesome” CIA photos of Osama bin Laden after he was killed in the May 1 U.S. raid. Judicial Watch filed suit in May to get the images released.
• Not unrelated to the aforementioned is Rick Poynor’s essay, “Should We Look at Corrosive Images?” Posted today but coming from the 2008 edition of Colors Notebook, the essay ponders the rhetorical, moral and psychological issues related to viewing ultra-violent images of war, concluding, in part, “It is doubtful, though, that anything positive can come from consuming a continuous flow of obscenely violent war pictures. From both a psychoanalytical and a political perspective, the conclusion is the same: we need to regulate our exposure to violent images.” For me, the essay conjures not images of bin Laden but of Thomas Hirschhorn’s overwhelming, immersive installation, Abstract Resistance (last on view at the Walker at last year’s group exhibition of the same name). The piece, as Jerry Saltz put it, is made up of “hundreds of astonishingly gory color images, gleaned from the Internet and specialty magazines, of mainly Arabs in Iraq and Afghanistan who have been blown to bits, bodies utterly destroyed — ‘bodies,’ as Hirschhorn has hauntingly put it, ‘in abstraction.’”
• Walker director Olga Viso took to the airwaves of Minnesota Public Radio’s Art Hounds today to recommend the Weisman Art Museum’s new expansion, which adds 8,000 square feet of gallery space. Frank Gehry’s first museum, the Weisman is an “an architectural landmark that we’re really, really lucky to have,” says Viso. It reopens Oct. 2.
• As Fair Labor in the Arts launches a campaign and petition on behalf of locked-out union workers at Sotheby’s, Unbeige posits that the auction house might prefer that your attention be diverted to Your Art World, a documentary series on Sotheby’s work. The first installment, launched this week, features artists Jeff Koons, Ronald Ventura, Cai Guo-Qiang and Amy Granat.
• Video: Your moment of non-word vocalizations in pop music.