– Brit Official Totally Fails at Bell-Ringing: Kicking off Martin Creed's highly-anticipated Olympics performance "Work No. 1197: All the bells in a country rung as quickly and as loudly as possible for three minutes," British secretary of culture and sport Jeremy Hunt began enthusiastically shaking a handheld bell. Before he knew it, the ring became unhinged and flew off, narrowly avoiding the woman standing behind him. The incident immediately began trending on Twitter with the hashtag #bellend. Luckily for us, there's already a disco remix (which we embed below, for your pleasure). [Guardian]
– Fire Deitch, Says Ex-MOCA CEO: The temperature continues to rise at L.A. MOCA. In a letter, Charles Young, the outspoken former CEO of the troubled L.A.'s institution, has urged trustee and friend Eli Broad to remove museum director Jeffrey Deitch. "I hope that the four-alarm fire now enveloping MOCA has at least given you pause for thought about his appointment," Young wrote Broad in an e-mail. "I will do anything I can to try to right the MOCA ship, but nothing will work without a new Captain/Director." [LAT]
– The New Museum Expands Online: The New Museum recently raised $1 million to expand virtually, redesigning its five-year-old Web site. The new site, four years in the making, goes live today and features a digital archive of the museum's 35 years, a directory of 400 independent art spaces in 96 nations, a series of digital artworks, and a blog featuring interviews and reviews. Let the time-wasting begin. [NYT]
– Upper East Side Antiques Dealer Wanted by Cops: Madison Avenue art dealer Subhash Chandra Kapoor is facing arrest after police uncovered a $30-million treasure trove of stolen Indian antiquities in four storage units he owns on New York's Upper West Side. Some of the bronze and stone statues still had dirt on them, according to a law enforcement official, who suspects they had been freshly removed from their temple homes. Kapoor is currently in custody in India on separate charges of trafficking in precious idols. [NYPost]
– British-Arab History Goes Online: Qatar teaming up with London's British Library to fund an £8.7-million project to digitize 25,000 pages of medieval Arabic manuscripts and 500,000 pages from the archives of the East India Company and India Office. The initiative, which will involve the creation of 43 jobs, aims to reveal the "forgotten history" of British involvement in the Gulf region. [TAN]
– Prized Pollocks on the Move: Two of the fabled Abstract Expressionist's biggest paintings have relocated to major museums' conservation departments this month. The Iowa University Museum of Art's fought-over "Mural" (1943) recently arrived at the Getty Museum's conservation lab, while the Museum of Modern Art is de-installing Jackson Pollock's "One: Number 31, 1950" for the first time since the museum's 2004 reopening — and replacing it, appropriately, with "Number 1 A, 1948." "We do have an equally great, though not as gigantic, Pollock,” said MoMA's chief curator of painting and sculpture Ann Temkin. "It’s the painting where Pollock’s hand prints are visible in the upper right-hand corner." [LAT, NYT]
– Zurich Throws Art in the Streets: A new exhibition installed in public places throughout the Swiss city includes works by some of contemporary art's biggest names, including a large neon text piece by Olympian bell-ringer Martin Creed installed on an office building, and a 17-feet-tall metal water bucket by Subodh Gupta at the site of a farmer's market. Perhaps the most striking work in "Art and the City" (continuing through September 23) is Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's installation of two armchairs of white marble — "Sofa in White" (2011) — outside the Credit Suisse headquarters. [WSJ]
– El Anatsui Comes to the High Line: Chelsea's elevated park has commissioned Ghanaian artist El Antasui to create a monumental drapery from pressed tin and mirrors. The work will be displayed on an outdoor wall adjacent to the park, between 21st and 22nd Streets. "He hasn't shown here much except in galleries," notes High Line Art curator Cecilia Alemani. Plus, those mirrors will look pretty cool reflecting the surrounding landscape. [NYT]
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– When Artists Competed in the Olympics: You won't see Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, or other London Cultural Olympians stepping onto any podiums in the next month, but did you know that for the first four decades of the modern Olympic Games medals were given for painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and music? Between 1912 and 1952, more than 150 works of sports-related art were rewarded with medals. The arts prizes were scrapped after the American Avery Brundage — who had received a mere honorable mention for a piece of writing he submitted to the 1932 Olympics — became president of the IOC and campaigned against them. [Smithsonian]
– Artist Serves Up Rat Feast: Wednesday night's opening for artist Laura Ginn's new exhibition at the Lower East Side's Allegra LaViola Gallery, "Tomorrow We Will Feast Again on What We Catch," featured an unusual menu of dishes made from rat meat, which Ginn presided over in a fragrant gown made from 300 rat pelts. "If I see an entire carcass, I might throw up," said diner and performance artist Clifford Owens. "This is about risk." [NYT]
– RIP L.A. Abstract Classicist Karl Benjamin: The abstract painter — who was classified as an "Abstract Classicist" in a LACMA exhibition in the late 1950s and was featured in a number of Pacific Standard Time exhibitions last year — died of congestive heart failure at his Claremont home on Thursday at age 86. His boldly colorful canvases of geometric forms made a comeback in recent years after falling from favor in the '70s and '80s. He was the subject of a major retrospective at his hometown museum, the Claremont Museum of Art, in 2007. [LAT]
VIDEO OF THE DAY
The disco remix of culture secretary Jeremy Hunt's bell-ringing fail
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