• Happy Zé Day! Musician and key Tropicália figure Tom Zé turns 75 today.
• Choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, alerted that dance moves in Beyoncé’s new video look a lot like hers, responded, “I didn’t know anything about this. I’m not mad, but this is plagiarism.” The Guardian, looking at the similarities between choreography in “Countdown” and De Keersmaeker’s work, concludes on a softer note. The Belgian choregrapher, noting that Beyoncé was four months pregnant during filming of the video, said, “I can only wish her the same joy that my daughter brought me.”
• The Guardian‘s Justin McGuirk: “Most governments have a cluster of thinktanks and policy groups at their disposal to tackle their country’s challenges. But what’s different about Sitra [the Finnish Innovation Fund] is that it uses designers.”
• Top photography blogger Joerg Colberg looks at Gerhard Richter’s “Overpainted Photographs” “not as paintings or photographs but objects that address much larger ideas than that of themselves.”
• Art224 post a nice animated video featuring the voice and graphic design of Paul Rand: “A work of art is realized when form and content are indistinguishable. When form predominates, meaning is blunted. But when content dominates, interest lags. Genius comes in when both of these things fuse.”
• Tyler Green reflects on the “cantankerous” Clyfford Still. “Still, even more than Pollock or de Kooning, was the hermit-hero who irked – or outraged – seemingly everyone in his path.” From the Walker collection, Still’s Untitled (1950-C).
• Wired looks at photography by Dornith Doherty, who documents the Svalbard “Doomsday” Seed Vault, an underground repository for seeds on the remote Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. The series captures “the logistics — and existential anxiety — behind the elaborate steps now in place to preserve the world’s crop diversity,” writes Pete Brook.
• METRO Magazine‘s 2011 METRO 100 list is out, and at number two is the Walker’s dance programming:
Lucy Guerin’s Structure and Sadness, Morgan Thorson and Alan Sparhawk’s Making Music Series collaboration and Despair Be Damned, a showcase of music and dance from the Democratic Republic of Congo, are just three recent reasons we like the Walker Art Center’s dance programming—which now rivals the breadth of its already-diverse visual-arts collection. The recent (and gigantic) Merce Cunningham Dance Company visual-arts acquisition coupled with the company’s farewell performance … sees the Walker pushing the envelope even further.
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