• In a “heartwarming display of New York crankiness,” Chuck Close grumbled about the trade of vocally Christian quarterback Tim Tebow to the Jets. “He’s going to be in the end zone praying? This is New York. He should go do that in, uh, the Midwest somewhere.”
• Shepard Fairey, who was asked by Penguin Books to do cover art for George Orwell‘s 1984 a few years ago, is now reportedly teaming up with Brian Grazer and Ron Howard to produce an adaptation of the 1949 work for the big screen.
• Money is often a theme in Damien Hirst‘s art (think: his infamous diamond-encrusted skull), but sometimes it transcends the art: LA MOCA postponed plans to host Tate’s Hirst survey because its $3 million cost was deemed too expensive.
• In a conversation with the UK’s CRACK magazine, Minneapolis-based designer and MCAD professor Erik Brandt discusses, among other topics, how living in Egypt, Cameroon, Germany, and Malawi affected his love of language and typography.
• For this year’s Northern Spark, a Minneapolis dusk-to-dawn art festival June 9-10, David Rueter is creating a bike “synch mob.” The Kuramoto Model (1,000 Fireflies) will synch up LED lights on 1,000 bikes to mimic firefly behaviors.
• Inside/Out gives a tour of Lester Beall‘s posters for the Rural Electrification Administration in the ’30s and ’40s: While nationalistic, the work highlights Beall’s “modernist design, which far outweighs the propagandist implications.”
• Noted performance artist Alison Knowles will stage her landmark Fluxus score Make a Salad (1962) on New York’s High Line for an April 22 commemoration of Earth Day.
• Screenshots of Despair: “Let’s get the crowd involved in documenting these weird, almost accidental moments, when the default algorithms that undergird the realm of the connected remind us, quietly but somewhat naggingly, that we’re all alone.”
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