• Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Steve Jobs: These are some of the figures Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro use in their face-substitution experiment, which uses face-tracking technology and color interpolation to create creepy mashup visages.
• David Hockney confirms: Language on posters for his Royal Academy of Arts show are a dig at Damien Hirst. “All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally,” it reads. He says Hirst’s use of assistants is “insulting to craftsmen.”
• Once controversial, Zbigniew Libera‘s 1996 artwork rendering of a concentration camp in Legos has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, which dubbed it “one of the most important works of contemporary Polish art.”
• It’s important “to situate an institution as a civically engaged place that has a stake in the political–or even just empathetic, compassionate–constellation of a city,” says Dan Byers, associate curator of the Carnegie International and former Walker curator.
• The Village Voice has laid off celebrated film critic J Hoberman. New York Times critic A.O. Scott notes that the paper “has been mostly irrelevant for years, EXCEPT for J Hoberman and a few others.” Hoberman has been a writer for the paper since 1983.
• Urban swings, trashcan basketball, and subway-stair slides are part of a trend Joop de Boer predicts for 2012: urban interventions that realize playful ideas within urban environments.
• Rest in Peace: Modernist ceramics artist Eva Zeisel, jazz saxophonist Sam Rivers, Color Field painter Helen Frankenthaler.
• PBS’s Art:21 released its trailer for Season 6, which will feature artists Ai Weiwei, Marina Abramovic, Lynda Benglis, Glenn Ligon, Sarah Sze, Catherine Opie, and others.
• An art student has Banksied the Polish National Museum, sneaking one of his portraits onto the wall in imitation of the UK street artist. “I decided that I will not wait 30 or 40 years for my works to appear at a place like this,” he said.
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