Enjoy Saturday’s night of revelry, readers, because when you wake up the next morning (or afternoon, we don’t judge), it’ll be time to reassess your life and commit yourself to unreasonable goals in hopes of self-improvement in 2012. Resolutions come in all shapes and sizes, and while many are deeply personal, Flavorpill’s are very public. We’ve created a list of our cultural resolutions for the new year — changes we’d like to see in the arts and entertainment landscape over the next 12 months, from trends that need to die to movements from 2011 that should make a bigger impact in 2012. Read our resolutions after the jump, and leave your own in the comments.
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While it doesn’t exactly make for light lunchtime reading, the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) has published a list of this year’s National Magazine Awards finalists, and we were happy to see that it includes some of our favorite writers, including Wells Tower, Christopher Hitchens, and Jerry Saltz. The New Yorker received the most nominations (nine!), followed by New York, The New York Times Magazine, and Virginia Quarterly Review, which all received six nods a piece. The winners will be announced at a dinner on May 9th, where the perennially dapper Tom Wolfe will be presented with the Creative Excellence Award for being “one of the most influential magazine journalists of our time.” Click through to peruse a list of the nominees in the public interest, reporting, feature writing, profile writing, and essays and criticism categories, including links to the articles and essays that are available online.
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Today at Flavorpill, we fell in love with the hilarious female star of this “Confessions of a Hipster” video. We were inspired by 10 of the most successful people who didn’t graduate from college. We wondered who was behind this strange Jerry Saltz hoax — and what they really got out of it. We looked for our favorites on this massive list of the best children’s books ever. We wished that the world had more magnetic recording tape art. We couldn’t believe how uncanny all 50 of this guy’s impressions were. We wanted one of Gordon Young’s typographic tree sculptures for our office. We watched six seasons of Hurley saying “dude” — which if you don’t watch Lost, is a lot. We thought it was funny but weird that Lou Reed plans to perform a high-frequency concert in Sydney that only dogs will be able to hear. We were amazed that this music video was produced entirely on a Nintendo DSi. And finally, we tried to imagine tweeting while climbing Mount Everest. Shouldn’t that kind of thing be physically impossible?
Hyperallergic correspondent Lisa Radon was on hand yesterday to catch a few choice statements made by New Museum head curator Richard Flood as part of a talk on “Creating Networks” at the Portland Art Museum, a lecture that began with a “sharply traced” viewpoint of the art world vis-a-vis Flood’s own impressive career and ended with a “wildly out-of-touch” conversation about art and the internet.
Radon’s presence at the talk, and her blog post thereafter, are direct contradictions to Flood’s assertion that the internet is a self-mutating chat room with no narrative, history, or scope. And what was the curator’s purpose in revealing that he “just found out about blogs three months ago”? Is it a confusing and convoluted ruse, a plot designed to jumpstart a new discussion in the arts community? Read what else Radon recorded after the jump and judge for yourselves.
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In the second part of a continuing, possibly infinite, series wherein we suggest to you the best Twitter feeds to follow, we’ve rounded up a selection of the World Wide Web’s most dedicated arts writers who impart their wisdom in nuggets 140 characters and less. These “Followables” love art but aren’t afraid to mock its ridiculous aspects, and for that, we’ll follow them ’til the ends of the Earth (from our own @flavorpill account, natch). See who made the cut and put your own suggestions in the comments.
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1. Beating out both Jennifer Garner and Keri Russell, Gossip Girl Blake Lively has been cast as the female lead opposite Ryan Reynolds in The Green Lantern. [via THR]
2. Billy Name, resident photographer of Andy Warhol‘s Factory for seven years, is missing his archive of negatives. [via NYT]
3. How the Jay Leno disaster could ultimately cost NBC more than $200 million. (Also of note: As a result, they’ve just unveiled six new drama pilots.) [via LAT]
4. Sarah Jessica Parker‘s new Bravo reality show Work of Art: The Next Great Artist will feature New York gallery owner Bill Powers, New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz, and curator Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, as judges; China Chow and Simon de Pury will host. [via Variety]
5. Foster Kamer explores the short distance between the branding of mega pop stars and the branding of indie rock bands like Vampire Weekend. [via Gawker]
Bonus link: The New Age Cavemen and the City
1. New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz on defending the New Museum: “At a certain point, the hatred seems unrelated to the offense. It is just people reveling in nay-saying and name-calling without examining the motivations for their behavior — and believe me, I know whereof I speak.” [via Vulture]
2. Imeem is in the process of being purchased by MySpace; that leaves LaLa. [via MediaMemo]
3. Bjork has written a song for Moomins and the Comet Chase, a freaky Finnish kid’s movie about hippo-like animals. [via Pitchfork]
4. David Letterman mocks the New York Times for their “douche” cover story. [via HuffPo]
5. In what Gawker is calling a photo disaster, there will be no full-frontal Levi Johnston in his upcoming spread for Playgirl. [via Gawker]
New York mag art critic Jerry Saltz, he of the gender parity crusade at MoMA and Glenn Beck challenge, profiles seven female artists in this week’s issue. Saltz points out that 36 percent of New York gallery solo shows are featuring women this fall, up from 17 percent in 2005, and highlights a cross-section of “gender-bending” work by women, including a full-scale museum show by multimedia artist Roni Horn at The Whitney. Read More »
CLICK HERE to view our gallery of female artists to know right now>>
Say the phrase “female contemporary artist” and you’re likely to conjure, via Google or collective memory, images of Cecily Brown’s writhing bodies; Tracey Emin’s messy, suggestive bed; Lisa Yuskavage’s kitschy soft porn; or Vanessa Beecroft’s nude installations. The financial success of such in-your-face sexuality — whether viewed with icy remove (Beecroft), humor (Yuskavage), or brassiness (Emin) — dovetailed nicely with the Third Wave feminism popularized in the early nineties. So what’s next for the double-X chromosome creative set in our current period? Photo evidence and a few words from art critic Jerry Saltz after the jump. Read More »
The text panel prefacing The Problem Perspective, the first major U.S. retrospective of German artist Martin Kippenberger, opens with a quote from Aristotle: “everything in moderation.” It then continues with the following statement: “Martin Kippenberger never got this message.”
Curatorial assistance or not, it doesn’t take long to pick up on the Dionysian overtones of Kippenberger’s work. At the entrance to The Problem Perspective an oat-covered Ford Capri peeks out into the foyer (a nudge to Anselm Kiefer) and continuing through the exhibit, the viewer passes by drunken street lamps (which unlike sober ones weave in and out of walls) deprecating self-portraits, and a junkie’s forest populated by disco balls, wooden pills, and ominously headless birch trees.
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