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Preserve 24, a new dining destination on the Lower East Side, wants you to know that it’s not just another restaurant. The sprawling space, which takes over three 111-year old tenement buildings, is also a multidisciplinary art installation, a social club, and a sitting room. All this is to say that artist Brian Goggin’s design isn’t just background noise in the newest locavore restaurant to hit the dining scene; in many cases, it’s the star of the show.

 NY Magazine reports on the 6 anxieties of social media & it’s pretty funny:

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1921)

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For all I know, Luhrmann has, like so many before him, succumbed to a book that may be too rooted in beautiful language and interior monologue to make an easy transition to the screen. But all of this Baz-doesn’t-get-it-and-ugh-3D-why-I-never monocle-dropping strikes me as carping that could’ve been written after the first trailer. For all I know, Luhrmann really has screwed up royally (by the time you read this, I’ll have attended a 10pm Thursday night show dressed in a white blazer and tie, so you can see where my biases live), but considering he shepherded one of the most distinctive Shakespeare adaptations withRomeo Plus Juliet, as the not-kids-anymore call it, as well as one of the best movie musicals of the past, oh, let’s say 50 years with Moulin Rouge, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on lavish, somewhat nutty challenges. For now, I’ll pre-emptively say that those who complain about the excess, glitz, and modern soundtrack choices of this version deserve every gauzy, soft-focus frame of the ’74 embarrassment.

Meanwhile, Geoff Mak asks if The Great Gatsby was the last great New York novel (despite it being almost a century old) and makes some good points about the ongoing trend of writing about times gone by rather than the contemporary moment:

It’s often praised as a top contender for the Great American Novel, but Gatsby also remains as the best New York novel I’ve ever read because it so fully embodies the city in the time during which it was written, while continuing to speak to readers (and especially New Yorkers) of every generation.[...] Virtually no one’s agreed on a successful New York novel in the years since 2001, when 9/11 came along and made writing about the contemporary city controversial in itself. [...] Critics have always favored the grand and historical over the contemporary and superficial, yet the current obsession with the past in American culture (Mad Men, chillwave) has brought us to a point at which readers are more partial than ever to nostalgia, which crowds out any kind of hope for a “generation-defining” New York writer.

If YOU’RE thinking of taking a shot at the next great novel, heed this advice from Mason Currey:

In his new book Daily Rituals, Mason Currey examines the creative processes that have kept writers, composers, and artists going throughout history. One secret to success? Keep your day job.

Robin Greason defends the previously maligned Artist Statement:

Jessie’s revised statement belongs to only one person, and it allows a viewer to locate something of the artist within her images. This artist statement enriches my experience of her photographs. Many people do not want to know anything about an artist beyond his or her work … but some of us do, and it’s this audience for whom an artist writes the dreaded statement. Unlike what Iris suggested, I’m not asking artists to become aware of all that is unconscious about the creative process, only to connect the dots afterward, because only the artist can.

The Raw Story reviews the latest Met exhibit on Punk and Couture:

“Chaos to couture” isn’t about gritty, revolutionary punk. It’s about pretty punk, about how a nihilistic subculture died, then came back to life as a catwalk fashion show.

The exhibit argues that punks’ love of low-cost, impromptu fashion statements — like a rip in a T-shirt, or a toilet chain as jewelry — was in tune with the way modern designers work.

[...]

After half a dozen rooms, the Met’s exhibit ends much in the same way as punk itself ended: with a gift shop.

Christian Viveros-Faune continues to review New York art fairs by looking at the new French invasion, Cutlog:

Whether the Lower East Side, or New York for that matter, is really home to an experimental arts scene is entirely beside the point—once you’ve firmly convinced yourself that it is. That is the logic of Cutlog, the first New York edition of a four-year-old French art fair dedicated to “experimental” and “cutting-edge art”, that has landed at a neo-Gothic pile at 107 Suffolk Street, between Rivington and Delancey Streets, in the heart of the massively gentrified (or is that galleryfied?) LES.

The most recent satellite fair—together with Collective.1, Nada, Pulse and others—to attach itself to the Beatles-like arrival of Frieze, Cutlog squarely identifies itself with the young, on which, pace George Bernard Shaw, youth is often wasted. At its most interesting when promoting post-MFA-type objects and performances, Cutlog does offer pearls scattered among gratuitously messy stunts.

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The Nation analyzes The Whitney Museum of Art’s new exhibition to explore abstract art through the blues & offers an alternative way of doing so, that focuses on and highlights the differences in African-American abstraction, which are often unaddressed:

While the analogy with music has always been an important way for abstract artists from Kandinsky onward to think about their work—and the recent MoMA exhibition “Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925” underscored this—music has been important to black American artists in a different way and to a different degree from what it has been for whites. This difference has allowed them, at times, a deeper understanding of the unity of the arts.

The difference is due to the centrality of music to black American culture, and to the near-universal acknowledgment of the validity of that music: its call seems never to fail of a response.

Whitten locates the sources of his culture in a kind of minimalism or reductivism—but not the sort typical of European modernism. It’s certainly not a search for purity, whether that’s understood as an attempt to determine the limits of each artistic discipline, as Clement Greenberg thought, or an irreducible definition of art, as Thierry de Duve or Arthur Danto might say. Rather, it’s an existential minimalism: to be reduced to nothing but one’s own resources is to know oneself, and to discover this knowledge as one that compels recognition is to find a bridge between isolation and universality.

Meanwhile, the Art Newspaper reports on the Tate Britian’s new chronological layout and what that means for the way visitors will experience art of the ages:

A key strength for Tate Britain is that the richness of the collection means that the lens (focused on Britain) is not overly narrow. Chronology has been used as a more neutral method of selection, and by using it as a kind of search tool we have produced what we hope will be a combination of the works that viewers would expect to see, alongside those that they would not.

Such juxtapositions and mixing of genres and styles, of early and late works can be revealing in various ways. This kind of chronological hang is more unusual, as it is properly chronological, in the sense that it follows real time rather than art historical time.

Melville House humorously critiques the Atlantic’s new e-publishing business:

Ebooks pose a dramatic problem for designers. You have no back cover. Where, then, to put all those big-name blurbs? Where to put your plot synopsis? The same copy that would be on the back now resides in the book descriptions on book’s page on Indiebound or Zola or Amazon, but the that artless black and white pool of editorial effluent can’t rival the luster a good designer can give a book’s textual elements.

A more subtle problem, however, is just this: where to put the colophon. Most publishers traditionally put the colophon on the spine so that it doesn’t clutter up the front and, more importantly, so that when a book browser happens upon the book in a shop she might see the mark of the publishing house and think “Ah, they make great books, I should examine this one” or, and this is perhaps the more usual train of thought, “Ah, I like penguins, they waddle, so cute, maybe this is a book about penguins? I should look.”

Hyperallergic discusses contemporary political art in the Emirates with artist Mostafa Heddaya:

I mean, it’s a super careful dance — they’ll let you say just the right things just enough, but not too much. Same goes to the media out here. If you read any of the news that comes out of here, there are a few interesting social commentators. Have you heard of Sultan Al-Qassemi? He’s one of those people who’s very critical, though you could say he gets away with it because he’s a member of the royal family. It’s interesting having someone like Sultan out here, as he’s an arts patron with a great collection of modern Arab masters and also contemporary art. And to top it off, his collection is quite political.

So you’ve got individuals who are open-minded and who don’t really mind pushing the boundaries … But do I see it changing in the future? I hope so, just for the sake of art out here, because otherwise it’s just going be that same group — Dubai just as some super-commercial area that’s never going to develop into something critical, and the art scene won’t develop.

They can always bring in political art from outside, but I still think it’s better when it’s homegrown.

Art Critic Dave Hickey discusses why he left the art world, focusing on the growing issue of money without taste and the celebrity of a a few artists:

Dave Hickey attacks the contemporary arts scene saying anyone who has ‘read a Batman comic’ can make a career for themselves in art. The professor and author condemns the ‘tourist mentality’ of the industry, complaining it has led to well-known artists being overestimated. The 71-year-old arts and culture critic said it has become ‘calcified, self-reverential and a hostage to rich collectors who have no respect for what they are doing’.

Is selling out the new way of keeping it real? n + 1 explores:

Barnes’s screed can be read as a founding document of a new pop era, in which it’s the musicians who get righteously angry at the fans on the subject of commercialism. The old complaint, in which artists are scorned for abandoning the communities that nurtured them and ascending into the corporate empyrean, has been replaced by a new one, in which artists rage at those same communities for not lifting them up high enough to keep body and soul together.

A video reminding us that whatever happens in our life, we should always be striving to simply make good art:

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