• A new National Endowment for the Arts survey finds there are 2.1 million Americans are employed as artists, including more than 42,000 right here in the Land o’ Lakes. Minnesota ranks fairly well: We’re among the top 14 states that have the highest percentage of the workforce employed in the arts: 1.5 percent, compared to the nation-leading New York, where 2.3 percent of the labor force is involved in arts industries. Minnesota leads the nation in the concentration of jobs in book publishing, with eight times more publishing jobs — largely in the Twin Cities — than the national average. Minneapolis’ concentration of theater jobs is twice the national average.
• As Occupy Wall Street gets a visual manifesto vaguely reminiscent of diagrams by the late Mark Lombardi, Shepard Fairey has released a series of free downloadable protest posters in solidarity with the movement.
• A talk on education reform by Sir Ken Robinson went viral — earning nearly 6 million views on YouTube — after the Royal Society of Art hired illustrator Andrew Park to turn it into a whiteboard animation. See the video in the Walker’s design show.
• With all the buzz about MOMA acquiring Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija‘s Untitled (Free/Still), one of the first works dubbed “relational aesthetics,” Greg Allen looks at a less discussed side of the artist — as a maker of “some of the blingiest, sexy-shiniest, most ridiculously commodified luxury objects around.”
• Franco & Eva Mattes of 0100101110101101.org say they got a fake Dieter Roth artwork — a glass jar filled with dead flies — into a St. Louis gallery show. “The piece has been shown for over a month, and nobody questioned its authenticity or worthiness. The image of the jar with flies started circulating on the Internet, and it’s also mentioned in Roth’s biography in Wikipedia.”
• Carsten Höller, the insect scientist turned artist whose two-story slide is now installed inside the New Museum: “Subjective personal experience in science is a no-no. In starting to make art, I wanted to bring in what had been forbidden.”
• Today in infographics: Word frequencies in the Bible and the Qu’ran. Via Information Aesthetics.
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