Yoko’s Tower of Light: Today Democracy Now spent an hour with Yoko Ono discussing the unveiling of her peace tower in Reykjavik (attended by Sean Lennon and Ringo Starr), government surveillance of her late husband, and the intersections of art and politics. And here’s a video on the concept and construction of the tower of light extending into the Iceland sky.
2007 Power 100: Art Review‘s “Power 100” is out, again featuring Francois Pinault at the top of the list of art’s most influential figures. Also making the list: former Walker curator and current Hammer senior curator Gary Garrels (58), Thomas Hirschhorn (44), former Walker chief curator and current New Museum curator Richard Flood (29), and Walker designers Herzog & de Meuron (77).
Yto Barrada interviewed: In a two-part audio interview with Open Democracy, artist Yto Barrada, featured in the Walker’s Brave New Worlds exhibition, discusses how, as a political science student she stumbled onto art: “I was living in the West Bank working on roadblocks, and the strategies of people who tried to cross in negotiating with the Israeli police, military police, and I started documenting my work with photographs,” she said. “And as my work evolved I started taking more photographs than notes, and then it completely shifted. The main part of my way of describing what I was interested in became through photographs, because I discovered that it was less restrictive than only my dissertation in political science. I started to be interested in art and all the possibilities it gave me to introduce the political situation.”