• UNESCO – the UN body that maintains World Heritage sites, among other activities – will lose a quarter of its budget after the U.S. announced it wouldn’t pay its dues following a vote by 107 nations to accept Palestine as a member.
• “The idea of ‘beauty’ represents the unexamined terminology of utopian thinking,” said Jake Chapman (pictured) at New York’s 92nd Street Y last week, “and it dangerously asserts one idea: that humanity is progressing and should progress towards a sort of Romantic sublime. I think the best art challenges the idea that beauty is a universal term.”
• Chinese authorities have served Ai Weiwei with an official demand telling him to pay 15 million yuan — or $2.3 million — in back taxes within 15 days, according to the artist, who says he doesn’t have the money to pay.
• New on Ubuweb, all the tracks on the 1993 two-disk release, A Chance Operation: The John Cage Tribute. Unfortunately chopped into small bits, the album features artists Laurie Anderson (performing/reading Cage’s text Cunningham Stories), Frank Zappa (doing Cage’s silent symphony 4’33”), and Yoko Ono, among others.
• “The best creative years for a photographer, I’d proclaim, are 20 to 40,” Alec Soth blogs, “but the peak is 25 to 35.” Commenters weigh in — en masse.
• Design thinker and a former New York Times art director Steven Heller calls the Walker’s Graphic Design: Now in Production the “ur-exhibit of the 2000s.”
• The Occupy Wall Street protests in New York are “kind of art object: a living installation or social sculpture made of bodies, animals, alternative barter stations for food, clothes, and books, a kitchen with composting, literature tables, public lectures, assemblies, a ‘community sacred space,’ drum circles, protesters, media center, press team, visiting journalists, walkways taped off for tourists, and lots and lots of text—painted, written, scrawled, and printed on every conceivable surface,” writes Martha Schwendener. “How could art — that is, the stuff made in the art world — compare with this?” One artist who’s taking a shot at the question is Pedro Reyes: He took his Karl Marx and Adam Smith puppets from the Walker’s Baby Marx exhibition to the New York protests.