Stories Around the World Winter 2015

1. NEW YORK This past July, a real-estate listing caught our eye - not so much because it promised a "classic six" in the Upper East Side's star-studded Beresford building, but more importantly, because this particular apartment was covered floor to ceiling with taxidermy. And we mean covered - check out Emily Andrews's eerie accompanying photo-spread, in which one end table alone boasts two birds and three rodents beneath a gapless array of moose, ram, and deer heads. More Information:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/artintheair/2014/12/17/museum-gifted-1-million-in-taxidermy-by-manhattan-socialite/?utm_source=BLOUIN+ARTINFO+Newsletters&utm_campaign=bb602f7223-Daily+Digest+12.18.2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_df23dbd3c6-bb602f7223-830057277.

2. This morning President Barack Obama announced that long strained relations with Cuba would be mended, and full diplomatic relations with the island nation restored. However, an embargo on Cuban goods, both imports and exports, will remain, though travel restrictions will ease and some imports will be allowed. So what does all this mean for the art world and its institutions? More Information: http://observer.com/2014/12/el-museo-del-barrios-director-on-what-restored-us-cuban-relations-mean-for-museums/10

3. Artists were among the earliest activists in the protests that erupted across the US in December over the grand jury decisions not to indict either of the policemen responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two unarmed black men.
More Information: http://theartnewspaper.com/articles/Police-killings-prompt-a-resurgence-in-political-art/36553

4. WARSAW- Aleksandra Wasilkowska, the vice-president of the Polish Architectural Association in Warsaw, doesn't care much for skyscrapers. At 36, the most promising architect in Poland is making a name for herself by focusing instead on the small-scale constructions of the so-called informal economy. Street stalls, collapsible tables, carts, and makeshift homeless shelters are but a few typologies of what the designer, artist, curator, and writer calls "shadow architecture" - the urban phenomena that follow the rise of an informal shadow economy. More Information:
http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1068422/shadow-architecture-political-toilets-and-makeshift-bazars?utm_source=BLOUIN+ARTINFO+Newsletters&utm_campaign=a6e0ea2a52-Daily+Digest+12.22.2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_df23dbd3c6-a6e0ea2a52-83005727

5. Does quilting count as art? In Four Centuries of Quilts, an expansive new survey published by Yale University Press, authors Linda Baumgarten and Kimberly Smith Ivey say yes. Many quilts actually take the viewer into the sublime, they write. They make you feel something you might not have felt otherwise. This is what makes quilts a form of art and not simply a craft with the function of providing warmth. More Information: http://hyperallergic.com/168905/a-new-book-argues-quilts-are-art/17.




6. The Rhydymwyn Valley works, near Mold, which housed mustard gas shells in World War 2, had been earmarked. Whitehall's Property Services Agency wanted assurances that the site could withstand flashes or blasts. But the Welsh Office changed its mind about needing an emergency storage base for the nation's "few valuable items". Fears of nuclear war with the Soviet Union had prompted government departments across the UK in the 1980s to plan for the worst, papers released by the national archives have revealed. More Information:
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-politics-30531025

7. PARIS.- Within hours of a terrorist attack that decimated the staff at Charlie Hebdo, copies of the latest issue of the satirical French weekly were drawing bids of more than 70,000 euros ($82,400) online.  The 60,000 print run of issue number 1177 sold out nearly instantly following the assault on the magazine's headquarters that killed 12 people, including some of its top journalists.  By midday Wednesday, scores of the three-euro magazine bearing a cartoon likeness of controversial French author Michel Houellebecq on its cover were popping up online at astronomical prices. More Information: http://artdaily.com/news/75613/Within-hours-of-a-terrorist-attack--Charlie-Hebdo-copies-draw-astronomical-prices-online#.VOUmRVPF9oF[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org 19.

 

8. NEW YORK (AFP).- Forty years after the end of the Vietnam war, US bombs dropped along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos have become expensive jewelry worn by American fashionistas. Delicate bracelets encrusted with diamonds, bronze pendants, necklaces and drop earrings -- all made from ordnance left over from America's deadliest war -- are on display on the sidelines of New York Fashion Week. Crafted by artisans in Laos, who smelted shrapnel in straw-roofed workshops, they are distributed by Brooklyn startup Article 22 and now sold in nearly 40 countries.  Inscriptions such as "love is the bomb" and "dropped + made in Laos" are engraved into the metal, a play on modern slang in which "bomb" means "cool," not just a lethal weapon of war. More Information: http://artdaily.com/news/76473/From-Laos-with-love--Vietnam-bombs-become-New-York-jewelry#.VPo51VPF9oE[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org

9. MUMBAI (AFP).- The Mumbai neighbourhood made famous by the film "Slumdog Millionaire" is set to host its first "biennale", aiming to promote health through creativity, although it will be very different to some of the world's grander art fairs. The three-week festival, opening Sunday, will
showcase works created by residents of Dharavi, the densely populated settlement in the heart of India's financial capital that is known as one of Asia's biggest slums. From hand-painted pots arranged to show how sexually transmitted diseases spread, to a quilted map marking known locations of domestic violence, the Dharavi Biennale is designed to raise awareness without being "preachy", say the organizers. More Information:
http://artdaily.com/news/76475/Mumbai-slum-holds-art-biennale#.VPo6UVPF9oE[/url]Copyright © artdaily.org