Category: Culture

A Feminist Version Of The Pirelli Calendar


A great initiative :

The show consists of 24 self-portraits shot by Marshall using a self-timer, 12 of which are glossy, sexually explicit images that channel those you might find in Pirelli or while leafing through the pages of Playboy, while the other 12 are raw, unadorned photos that express a femininity rarely observed in the mainstream media outside the occasional celebrity sans-makeup social media post.

Laid side-by-side, the contrast between these two women—who are in fact the same woman—is jarring. Both an homage to and a critique of the form it inhabits, “The Feminist Calendar” posits that perhaps these two aspects of womanhood aren’t as contradictory they seem.

→ Artnet

American Apparel Files for Bankruptcy


In one piece, hopefully :

American Apparel, the one-time arbiter of edgy made-in-America cool, filed for bankruptcy protection early Monday, its business crippled by huge debts, a precipitous fall in sales, employee strife and a drawn-out legal battle with the retailer’s ousted founder, Dov Charney.

→ The New York Times

Ben Bernanke: More Execs Should Have Gone to Jail for Causing Great Recession

Bernanke has been interested in the Great Depression since his grandmother told him stories about it from her front porch in Charlotte, N.C., during quiet summer evenings. Her family had been living in Norwich, Conn., where some children went to school in worn-out shoes or even barefoot because their fathers lost their jobs when the shoe factories closed. That meant their families didn’t have enough money to buy shoes — which presumably would have kept the factories in business and their fathers employed.

I agree for the most part with the following, but how do you distinguish between human actions and a process, the securitization to name it, that once pushed to its limits and at a fragile moment gives birth to monsters all around?

And didn’t Bernanke knew about the unprecedent levels and untested territories of loan originations that were about to be pooled into CDOs ?

I doubt he was unaware.

He would have favored more individual accountability. “While you want to do everything you can to fix corporations that have bad cultures and encourage bad behavior — and the Fed was very much engaged in doing that — obviously illegal acts ultimately are done by individuals, not by legal fictions.”

→ USA Today

The Art World’s Biggest Lie: A Dealer Apologizes for Collecting as Investing

Adam Lindemann :

Just over the horizon was a whole new group of people who would change the game. Appearing as if from nowhere, like a biblical swarm of locusts: The art advisors. When I wrote my collecting book, there were just a few of them, influential and very knowledgeable, so I included some (Mark Fletcher, Thea Westreich, Sandy Heller among them). But, in the last few years, advisorshave popped up literally everywhere and now outnumber collectors 2 to 1. There are almost as many of them as yoga instructors.

The art-advisor phenomenon is a direct result of the change in the way buyers view their art buying. Today, the “collecting” audience no longer needs to be convinced their money is being well spent; they have bought into the art-as-investment thesis hook, line and sinker. So, in the same way you hire an investment advisor to manage your portfolio, and a management consultant to streamline your business, you now must hire an advisor to help you decide what art to “invest” in.

Gone are the days of “I simply must have it,” today there are two serious types of buyers. The mega art buyers who want international trophy art, who have no budget limit and only want the artistic equivalent of oceanfront property. Then there’s the hot money players: Wise guys, hooligans and celebrities. They go for what’s hot, what’s going to make them look smart and make them fast money.

Credit : Hanna Barczyk

→ The Observer

The Flâneur Discovers Paris, a Step at a Time

I became a serious flâneuse (a female flâneur) when I fell madly, passionately, obsessively in love — with a street, the half-mile Rue des Martyrs in my Paris neighborhood. I was swept away by its spirit, feeling giddy when I strolled up and down the street at random hours of the day or night. I embraced its rhythm, which began at 6 a.m. when street sweepers opened valves that sent rivers of water downhill along the gutters, and ended well after midnight with the closing of the bars and the cross-dresser cabaret.

→ The New York Times