• Since she finished her Walker curatorial fellowship in 2003, curator Claire Tancons has focused on carnival traditions in the Americas — a lens through which she’s now viewing the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York. Carnival, “as medium of emancipation and instrument of political protest, is alive and well,” she writes in an essay for the NYC Independent Media Center, also noting that the NYPD clampdown on masks suggests law enforcement has a “fear of carnival as a potent form of political protest.” She writes:
What is at stake here is not so much whether or not the carnivalesque is at works in turning Occupy Wall Street into a revolutionary movement. Rather, it is the realization, through carnivalesque ritual strategy and hierarchy inversion, of the expanse (and expense) of the political antagonism and binary extremism between the 1% and the 99%. As much a site of resistance as a relational mode, the carnivalesque occupation of Wall Street is a symbolic struggle to break the high-low binarism that has besieged contemporary American society.
• After being dubbed the most powerful figure in the art world by Art Review, Ai Weiwei gets “innovator of the year” honor from the Wall Street Journal.
• I’m Spartacus? More like: I’m Banksy.
• The New Museum’s installation of a giant slide by Carsten Höller is coming along nicely. View the installation shots on Flickr.
• Minnesota Citizens for the Arts has started a campaign around a proposal by some GOP state legislators to divert money from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, created in 2008 by a voter-approved constitutional amendment, to a Vikings stadium.
• Today: Picasso was born (in 1881); Sen. Paul Wellstone died (in 2002).
• “The Picasso of pumpkin carving.”
Get Walker Reader in your inbox. Sign up to receive first word about our original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, and artist interviews.