Hasta La Ideas

Another big batch of recognition is set to be placed upon artist Ai Weiwei this week. Following Art Review‘s listing of the artist as their top pick in their Power 100 ranking, the artist, who earlier this year served a three-month detainment at the hands of Chinese government officials for whom Weiwei continues to be a thorn in the side of, will be named on Thursday WSJ‘s Innovator of the Year in the art category. It’s the first year of the Innovator’s issue for the Wall Street Journal‘s magazine counterpart, with a dinner honoring the winners this Thursday evening at the MoMA, with the issue in print following this Saturday. However, despite Weiwei’s recent ever-presence, he’s still under house arrest in his native China, so it’s been planned that fellow artist Marina Abramovic will accept the honor on his behalf. At the event, the artist will join the ranks of designer Katie Grand, winning for the fashion category, Bjarke Ingels for architecture, and Chipotle founder Steve Ells for food.

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Street art duo Miss Bugs has created this series of artworks that are designed to blend in with a variety of backdrops around London, including advertising posters, murals and even postboxes…

Titled Cut Out/Fade Out, the artworks are constructed on MDF frames, and feature collages made up of photos of the underlying location overlaid with other found images. Many of them are over 8ft tall. Once completed, Miss Bugs places them in position on the street, and leaves them there for the public to respond to. “I think the longest that a work has stayed in place is two weeks,” says Missum, one half of Miss Bugs, “though I think most installations are pretty short-lived and are moved by the council. No doubt they consider them an obstruction or some sort of health and safety hazard.”

Farringdon

Southbank

Due to changing visual landscape of the city, the duo have to work quickly to make and install their works before the backdrops they are based on change. “Once we have chosen the location we try to work as quickly as possible as things in the city tend to change rapidly,” explains Missum. “We have no way of knowing if the billboard advert or the wall that we used as a backdrop to our piece is still going to be there or if it will be painted over when we return. So we normally have a rough idea of the figures and can create a piece and take it to the location within a week.”

Cut outs in the studio before installation

Commercial Street

Occasionally things go wrong, however. “We’ve been quite lucky, although we have lost a few,” continues Missum. “One was a London Tube sign on a building site barrier. We spent a week working on it and went to the location to find the workmen with the barrier had up and left! It’s a little upsetting to have put all the work in and then not be able to see the final result, but I guess that’s the downside of working in such a dynamic medium.” So far, Miss Bugs has placed around 20 artworks on the streets around London. They have also recently created cut outs to use as part of an indoor set, although Missum admits she prefers the street works. “Although the Cut Outs can work indoors as part of an installation, they are definitely more theatrical in this setting,” she says. “I think they really work best when found on the street – that’s when people can connect with them and more often than not start using their phones to photograph themselves and their friends posing next to them.”

Coldharbour Lane

Brixton

Miss Bugs rarely finds out where the artworks end up. “Probably a few have been taken to a new home but we’ve seen one in the back of a Westminster Council waste van, looking pretty sorry for herself,” says Missum. “We always hope a few manage to stick around for at least a day or two so people can enjoy them. We always watch for a while at a distance and see people line the piece up with the background on their camera phone or just put their arm round them and give them a kiss. I’ve always liked art that people instinctively interact with, something that can’t always be done with a flat picture on paper or a wall.”

Ebor Street

If you’d like to see some of Missum’s work in the flesh, she is holding an exhibition of works on paper at the Ink_d gallery in Brighton from this Friday (October 21). More info is at ink-d.co.uk. To see the cut out works, however, you will simply have to keep your eyes peeled around London Town… More on Miss Bugs can be found online at missbugs.com.

The art world has been operating like a Dallas cliffhanger this week with the publication of Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith‘s book, Van Gogh, The Life, which has left people wondering, “Who really shot Van Gogh?” The book posits that the shot that ultimately killed him was delivered by the hands of two teenage boys, not from a suicide attempt by the artist himself as has long been presumed (helped along because that’s what Van Gogh told everyone before his death). The authors have stirred up something of a controversy by introducing this new theory, claiming that the shooting was either an accident or an intentional act and that the artist simply didn’t want to see the boys punished. Given Van Gogh’s posthumous legacy, with his name now synonymous with “great art” and his paintings now selling in the millions, it’s just the sort of theory that commands attention and helps to sell books. Case in point, 60 Minutes even dedicated a whole feature to it this past Sunday. However, the organization who perhaps knows the artist best, the Amsterdam-based Van Gogh Museum, isn’t quite ready to update all of their information just yet. In a post on the museum’s site, they agree that the book poses an interesting theory, but raising a few issues they have with the theory, state that “plenty of questions remain unanswered” and that “it would be premature to rule out suicide as the cause of death.”

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There’s to be some new blood at New York’s High Line soon. It’s been announced that Cecilia Alemani has been appointed the new curator and director of the High Line Art Program, taking over from Lauren Ross, who left the position at the start of the summer after having taken a job at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa. Alemani had previously worked as an independent curator and writer, working with organizations like the Tate Modern, the MCA in Chicago, and the MoMA and its P.S.1, to name just a few. Most recently she was found guest curating for Performa 11 and collaborating on the Frieze Art Fair in London. Here’s a bit from the announcement:

“After an extensive search, it is clear that Cecilia is the best candidate to lead High Line Art. Cecilia is a thoughtful, forward-thinking curator who will bring an innovative approach to structuring the public art program on the High Line,” said Donald R. Mullen, Jr., the founding supporter of High Line Art and Board member of Friends of the High Line. “I have often said that the High Line is the new museum mile. High Line Art celebrates the park’s role in connecting two neighborhoods that make up the cultural hub of New York City, with the more than 400 galleries and cultural organizations that populate the streets below the park. Cecilia’s curatorial leadership will elevate High Line Art to new level in New York City and the international art world.

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With the hotly anticipated opening of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art coming in just a few weeks, you’d assume that all eyes would be locked on the building and the collection. However, there was an awkward shift of that gaze this weekend with the news that the museum’s founder, chief benefactor, and heiress to the Wal-Mart fortune, Alice Walton, was recently arrested for a DWI in Texas. According to the Weatherford Democrat, Walton was pulled over for speeding and the officer determined that she was intoxicated. She was arrested and spent the night in jail, released the following morning after paying a $1,000 bond. The paper continues that this follows another DWI charge in 1998, and an incident in which Walton was “involved in crash that resulted in the death of a 50-year-old pedestrian.” While the heiress has since released a statement about this latest run in with the vehicular law, wherein she states that she “accepts full responsibility for this unfortunate incident,” it’s surely not the sort of press that plays well before a major cultural opening. However, we suppose the news cycle is fast and the eyes will all shift back to the art and the building by November 11th.

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