• Within hours of news of the death of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, artists had already created homages, the first, surely, of many to come. And The Pop-Up City notices how Apple stores worldwide “have transformed into churches today,” with impromptu memorials appearing everywhere from San Francisco to New York to Beijing.
• The Centro Niemeyer in Avilés, Spain — an arts facility designed by and named after 103-year old Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer — has closed down after just six months amid governmental claims of accounting “irregularities” and concerns about maintenance costs for the $58.4 million center.
• Gerhard Richter says the fact that a painting from his “Candle” series is expected to sell at auction for between $9 and $14 million is “impossible to understand and it’s daft…. It’s just as absurd as the banking crisis.” Linking up the story, Animal NY asks if it’s “time to #OccupyArtWorld.”
• Real Clear Arts‘ Judith Dobrzynski looks at audience participation in curation. Her take: With the Walker’s experiment in “crowdsourced curation” in the recent exhibition 50/50: Audience and Experts Curate the Collection — visitors selected half the show’s works, while Walker curators seleted the other half — “[t]here was value in comparing the two.” But she’s less fond of the Plains Art Museum’s show You Like This: A Democratic Approach to the Museum Collection, which put the public in control of curation, from voting on favorite works to include to placement of art based on each piece’s popularity. Dobrzynski says such choices “devalue the curatorial profession” and offers some analogous questions: “[S]hould we all vote on what is taught in primary school classrooms? Should people vote on the medical treatment of an ailing loved one? Do chefs let their clients vote each morning on what they should prepare?”
• The New York Times on how Arab artists visualized revolution before it happened.
• News that Christophe Szpajdel, dubbed the “Paul Rand of Metal,” will be part of the Walker’s upcoming graphic design show sent me digging for this hilarious old Vice interview with the artist, who has hand drawn several thousand logos for black- and death-metal bands with names like Death Messiah and Nachtmystium. Check out the logos on his Flickr page (1, 2, 3), and look for more on Szpajdel on the Design blog as the exhibition (opening Oct. 21) nears.
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