Reader: Feb 15, 2010

– The difference of gender when older, more powerful figures (usually of a political level) cheat for the younger and more vulnerable.

– I swear I will make a run around Chelsea tomorrow and come up with a similar article titled Bad Girls in Galleries.

– Treating sugared beverages like tobacco, banning and taxing our obesity away.

– Elizabeth Albert. via PS1’s studio visit. Just discovered this registry of local artists, via c-monster’s kinkade’s profile being hoax.

– Curious to know why this article didn’t mention Chanterelle’s artist made menu drawings being exhibited at Greenpoint’s own Kill Devil Hill. It was a killer show and I will digress further later.

– A 19th century recipe for chocolate caramel is transformed into a black sugar galzed Medjook dates with pecorino and walnuts. yum.

– Google Buzz apologizes over their invasion of privacy.

– How food shapes our cities. Remember, a western diet is an unsustainable diet. Great quote : “Food is a fundamental ordering principle of Utopia.” Hale semi-independent city states where farming is mad and folks grow their own vegetables. But as Utopia is no place, she coins Sitopia: Food place, a world shaped by food, used as a powerful tool, the center of life and society. Think ahead about food, networks and markets grown and exchanged locally. Sitopia already exists, just use food as a way of seeing. Cities can be symbiotically connected to nature, thinking as doing, creating a bonding relationship between the country and city. The world is what we eat. Use food to shape it better. Amen

– The lobster roll craze started with food, curated and ends with Ben toasting hot dog buns on the back of his scooter. Priceless.

– Roberta Smith complains there’s too much cold space in big museum shows, not enough oomph. “useum curators need to think less about an artist’s career, its breakthroughs and its place in the big picture and more in terms of an artist’s life’s work pursued over time with increasing concentration and singularity. They have a responsibility to their public and to history to be more ecumenical, to do things that seem to come from left field…Message to curators: Whatever you’re doing right now, do something else next.”

– John  Baldessari as packrat, recycling images. “I don’t think imagery should be owned. If it’s part of the world, it’s like words, how can you own words? It’s stuff to be used.”

– Celebrity musicians as art collectors.

– Ryan McGinley’s photos of the Olympics, shot with the same ethereal hippie touch. Was he commissioned to do this as an artist or as a photojournalist or a photographer or what?

– Museum toilets. via c-monster

– Scavenger art hunt using tweeted clues. An alternative attempt at getting your artwork out there. “A game that raises questions: Is it about art? Or self-promotion? The thrill of the hunt? Or a sly comment on art appreciation? Is it generous or, considering he’s unknown, desperate? Does it prove, as he believes, you don’t need “a gallery light shining on a work to show art; the city can be your gallery”? Or the opposite — that context matters, and, considering how many people walk past his art without pausing, real art is gallery art?”

– On “sentimentality and its conflicted relation to contemporary art“.