MAFIAA: As a new documentary demonstrates that the secretive movie-ratings board, the MPAA, is really a group of 10 untrained, anonymous Los Angeles-area parents, one Digg user proposes a way to crash the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) server and another suggests a merger of the movie and music industries. The name: MAFIAA. Update: Turns out the MAFIAA — at least in gag form —already exists.
Helvetica@SXSW: Among the “tightly kerned crowd” that turned out for the world premiere of the film Helvetica at SXSW was Unbeige‘s Alissa, who hailed it as “the best history of graphic design we’ve ever seen.” She writes that the real star was the “adorable Michael Bierut” (who speaks at the Walker as part of a March 20 panel) as he delivered “the best monologue in the whole movie–an awesome treatise on corporate design that got the biggest laughs and a hearty round of applause.” Tickets for the Walker’s May 31 screening are now on sale.
Gehry Revisited: Walk around the University of Minnesota’s Weisman Art Museum and you’ll have a moment of disconnect: a right-angle and a red-brick wall disrupting the flow of undulating panels of stainless steel. Architect Frank Gehry, who designed the Weisman in his first American museum project, says the structure always felt “incomplete with the animation facing the river.” This morning, the museum shared plans for an 11,000-square foot, $10 million expansion by Gehry that’ll add gallery space, a cafe and terrace, and round out — literally, in some spaces — his original 1993 building.
Phantasms: Ann Klefstad, content editor at mnartists.org, recently interviewed Kara Walker exhibition curators Philippe Vergne and Yasmil Raymond on Walker’s “phantasms of race,” the link between her work and critiques by Goya and Spike Lee, and the timeliness of imagery of slavery and subjugation. Raymond says, “[Y]ou cannot open the newspaper today without seeing the core of what she is discussing in her work, whether it’s through Fallujah, Sudan, the crisis of immigration in Europe, it’s everywhere. She’s able to put her finger on these issues, without being a preacher, she’s every thing that she is, and everything ugly she can touch with her history.”
Get Walker Reader in your inbox. Sign up to receive first word about our original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, and artist interviews.
)