• Videos of police pepper-spraying nonviolent student protesters at UC-Davis went viral over the weekend, and one result is the new Tumblr site peppersprayingcop.tumblr.com, which has plenty of art references: The cop who casually sprayed students at point blank range finds himself superimposed into Picasso’s Guernica, da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s anti-war Bed-In, and Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, to name a few.
• Following her big MoMA retrospective last year, performance artist Marina Abramovic (who also got the pepper-spray photoshop treatment) “experienced a radical shift in status: art-world divinity to crossover media star,” writes the New York Times‘ Guy Trebay.
• Chinese authorities want to pin another crime on Ai Weiwei: Distributing pornography. Ai’s assistant Zhao Zhao has reportedly been interrograted by police over a photo of a nude Ai appearing beside four likewise nude women. Now the Guardian reports that some of Ai’s fans are tweeting nude self-portraits to the artist in solidarity. Hyperallergic captures some of their NSFW creations.
• Pina — Wim Wenders’ 3D film about choreographer Pina Bausch — is among the 15 shortlisted documentaries for the next Oscars.
• Our friends at Intermedia Arts here in Minneapolis have launched ArtsHub, a shared office/creative confab arrangement for artists. It’s the brainchild of artist Peter Haakon Thompson, who’s behind several local arty institutions, including the Art Shanty Projects (in which artists reimagine ice-fishing shacks for more creative purposes) and The A Project (in which arts supporters identify themselves to neighbors by putting signs bearing a bright red A in their windows).
• In conjunction with its exhibition The Air We Breathe, featuring 30 works commissioned by artists including Raymond Pettibon and Amy Sillman on equal rights for same sex couples, SFMOMA hosted a livestreamed panel discussion Friday about the state of the campaign for marriage equality. I’m curious what the artistic response will be here in Minnesota to next fall’s ballot measure that proposes to add a ban on same-sex marriage into the state constitution.
• The new Clyfford Still Museum opens in Denver.
• With new protests against the military government in Egypt, new graffiti is appearing in Tahrir Square.
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