Salon.com > Jillian Steinhauer

Jews are now works of art

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:44:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, my sister was in the Passover aisle of her local supermarket when a woman came up to her and asked if she knew where the tahini was. She didn’t. The woman explained that it was always in this particular aisle but now wasn’t, which led my sister to explain that it had likely been moved because it isn’t kosher for Passover, which in turn led the woman to begin inquiring about Passover rules. That blossomed into a larger, nearly half-hour-long conversation about Judaism, with the woman asking lots of questions and my sister trying to answer them. “I did the best I could,” she told me. As anyone who’s ever been expected to represent their entire religion/race/ethnicity/gender/world view knows, it’s a pretty difficult task.

New York pay phones’ new calling

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:08:00 +0000

The winners of a city-sponsored contest to redesign New York’s payphones have been announced, and it looks like the clunky yet iconic — and these days, often broken — booths of decades past will soon be replaced by slim, digital screens offering wifi, summaries of weather conditions, a chance to pay your parking tickets, and much more.

Smart Sidewalks

Illegal immigration as art exhibit

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:46:00 +0000

In the summer of 2012, University of Michigan anthropologist Jason De León and a group of his students were doing fieldwork in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona when they came across the body of a 41-year-old woman. Her name was Marisol, and she was dead. She had been for four days.

[caption id="attachment_13220824" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="A map of a portion of the Sonoran Desert showing the spot where Marisol was found"][/caption]

“The way she was lying on the hill, it was like she had collapsed mid-crawl,” one of the students told artist Richard Barnes. De León explained the scene in an essay:

Tour old-school Brooklyn with these historical photos

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 22:00:00 +0000

History nerds and Brooklynophiles, rejoice! The Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Brooklyn Public Library have teamed up to put large chunks of their collections online. The result is Brooklyn Visual Heritage, which is pretty much what it sounds like: a website devoted to a visual history of the borough.

The site was developed through something called Project CHART (Cultural Heritage, Access, Research and Technology), a collaboration between the three Brooklyn institutions plus Pratt Institute’s School of Information and Library Science. It contains thousands of historic images, from street corner shots to beautiful period interiors, old postcards, pictures of the Brooklyn Dodgers, everyday life, crime scenes, housing projects, the waterfront, trade cards, and more, ranging from the late 19th century to the late 20th. You could easily get lost on this site for hours. (I did.)

Edward Gorey’s strange, curious world

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 17:00:00 +0000

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I had an unusual obsession. While most of my favorite TV shows and programming blocks were the same as everyone else’s in my peer group —Animaniacs, Saturday morning cartoons, Nickelodeon’s What Would You Do? — I also watched the PBS show Mystery! with a fervent dedication, particularly Agatha Christie’s Poirot, in which British actor David Suchet plays the incredibly polite and incredibly smart Belgian detective. The show was mesmerizing for a number of reasons: its intriguing mysteries, which, hard as I tried, I could never solve; its bewitching Britishness; and the attendant propriety that came with that culture. Even though Poirot was nearly always solving the grimmest of crimes, both the show and its hero approached them with the utmost tidiness and nothing nearly so obvious as surprise. This was murder with high tea and a pair of leather gloves on.

An outsider artist’s inner life

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:27:00 +0000

Although he traced and painted and wrote in obscurity until the day he died, Henry Darger is, today, probably the best-known outsider artist in the world. In the past decade or so, the confines of his one-room Chicago apartment have ceded to the spacious galleries of museums and art fairs, and Henry Darger — a man who kept mostly to himself, not quite reclusive but not incredibly social either — has become the poster child of outsider art.

But what happens when someone becomes famous, especially posthumously, is you (or I) sometimes forget that there is or was a person behind that fame — a real person, a human being, who lived a life and created the art that people now refer to, both succinctly and dismissively, as “those paintings of the little girls with the penises.” It’s good to remember and revisit that human being once in a while.

Art world speaks out against drones

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 22:00:00 +0000

Ever since the federal government announced plans to expand its use of drones for domestic surveillance, concerns have been growing over what that will mean, particularly for people’s right to privacy. It seemed like only a matter of time, then, before smaller local governments started passing laws to try and grapple with the issue. On Monday, Charlottesville, Va., became the first city to pass an anti-drone resolution.

Edward Gorey’s not as macabre as you think

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I had an unusual obsession. While most of my favorite TV shows and programming blocks were the same as everyone else’s in my peer group —Animaniacs, Saturday morning cartoons, Nickelodeon’s What Would You Do? — I also watched the PBS show Mystery! with a fervent dedication, particularly Agatha Christie’sPoirot, in which British actor David Suchet plays the incredibly polite and incredibly smart Belgian detective. The show was mesmerizing for a number of reasons: its intriguing mysteries, which, hard as I tried, I could never solve; its bewitching Britishness; and the attendant propriety that came with that culture. Even though Poirot was nearly always solving the grimmest of crimes, both the show and its hero approached them with the utmost tidiness and nothing nearly so obvious as surprise. This was murder with high tea and a pair of leather gloves on.

Ayn Rand’s wacky art theory

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 20:43:00 +0000

Did you know that Ayn Rand had a theory of art? No? Neither did I! But I discovered it recently, thanks to a tip from painter Abigail Markov. It’s encapsulated in the hefty 539-page treatise "What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand," written and compiled by Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi. And while I didn’t buy the book — no, I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that — I did have a chance to read excerpted bits from the book as well as chapter summaries online. I’d like to share with you, dear reader, some of the key takeaways.

Let’s start where the book starts, with the most basic question of all: what is art? This is actually the hardest one to answer without the full text in front of us, but the website does provide some clues: Rand sees the primary purpose of art as “nonutilitarian and psychological in nature” and says that its cognitive function is “to bring man’s fundamental concepts and values ‘to the perceptual level of his consciousness’ and allow him ‘to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts.’” OK, fair enough. I can get with that.

What does “outsider artist” even mean?

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, my fellow Hyperallergic editor Kyle Chayka wrote a post about video artist Wendy Vainity, who makes bizarre, creepy, and sometimes funny 3D animations. Chayka began by posing a question: Does Wendy Vainity actually know what she’s doing?

I found this lead-in curious, as it’s not clear what the alternative would be: that Vainity doesn’t know what she’s doing? That she somehow made her videos and posted them on YouTube without being fully conscious? I’m not sure. Chayka draws out his point later in the post. He writes:

Are the videos outsider art, or the work of a knowing artist making amazingly weird work on purpose? Wendy Vainity might be the Henry Darger of the web, an artist working outside of the mainstream but creating something so strangely compelling that you just can’t look away.

Warhol soup cans at your supermarket!

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 16:00:00 +0000

It only took 50 years, but Campbell’s is finally paying tribute to pop artist Andy Warhol and his game-changing paintings of their soup cans. Starting this weekend, the company will release 1.2 million special-edition cans with Warhol-inspired labels, although in this case that mostly just means brightly colored, with a picture of the artist on the back. The promotion marks the 50th anniversary of the exhibition where Warhol first showed this soup-can paintings, at LA’s Ferus Gallery in 1962.

The Huffington Post reports that the soups will be sold at Target for a meager 75 cents each! That’s lower than the price of a regular can of Campbell’s soup — so pretty much the opposite of how limited-edition products are usually priced.

I’m not positive, but I think this might be the first soup-based product collaboration from the Andy Warhol Foundation. And the foundation is getting into another area for the first time this fall: makeup. As with the soup, I’m not sure how that didn’t happen sooner.

Romney to ax art funding

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Politico has excerpts from an upcoming Mitt Romney interview in Fortune magazine, in which the Republican presidential candidate expounds on his plan to shrink the federal government and reduce spending. Depressingly, but not surprisingly, he targets arts funding, saying:

[F]irst there are programs I would eliminate. Obamacare being one of them but also various subsidy programs — the Amtrak subsidy, the PBS subsidy, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of these things, like those endowment efforts and PBS I very much appreciate and like what they do in many cases, but I just think they have to stand on their own rather than receiving money borrowed from other countries, as our government does on their behalf.

This means not a reduction in the funding for PBS or either of the National Endowments but complete elimination. Goodbye, NEA! It’s been a wild ride. (On a side note: Amtrak is already a hot mess. Privatizing it would seem to be the last nail in the coffin of nationwide public transport. Americans love their damn cars so much it makes me sick.)

Hipsters at the Louvre

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 16:14:00 +0000

Typically when I see the marble and stone statues of men in the Louvre, “cute” and “sexy” are not words that come to mind. But two designers from France, Alexis Persani and Leo Caillard, have photoshopped hipster outfits onto Louvre sculptures, all of men, and the results are pretty amazing.

Suddenly those classical hairstyles — the beards and mustaches; the cute, curly locks; even a garland, which is not my usual taste in male headgear — look completely contemporary. The models’ lunging or swaggering poses seem entirely of a piece with the half-buttoned denim jacket, the yellow-frame sunglasses, the plaid flannel shirt that Persani and Caillard have skillfully added. The images in the series, Street Stone, look like they could come straight out of a Brooklyn Industries catalogue.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="420" caption="An image from the “Street Stone” series, Alexis Persani and Leo Caillard"][/caption]

Christo project delayed

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 15:00:00 +0000

US District Judge John Kane issued a mixed order yesterday in the case of Rags Over the Arkansas River (ROAR) versus the artist Christo and his controversial “Over the River” project. The order pertains to a lawsuit that ROAR filed against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) earlier this year, the group’s second legal attempt to halt the project, which proposes to drape miles of translucent fabric over a federally protected stretch of the Arkansas River.

Judge Kane granted the BLM’s motion to stay, or pause, ROAR’s case, which, at first glance, may seem like a victory for Christo; however, Kane refused to dismiss the case outright, ordering instead that it will resume after another legal challenge to “Over the River” finishes its proceedings. That case is an appeal filed by Rocky Smith, a Colorado man unaffiliated with ROAR, along with a number of others, challenging the BLM’s approval of “Over the River.” The appeal is being reviewed by the Interior Board of Land Appeals.