Surveying the last year of stories on In The Air, the ARTINFO newswire, we’re struck by the non-stop interaction they show between the art world and the broader world of popular culture. From Lady Gaga’s Jeff Koons-designed album cover to George Bush’s own artistic coup — making people forget his distressingly awful presidency with his impressively mediocre paintings — 2013 was a big year for the mainstreaming of contemporary art. Also popular were stories about naked men in museums (some invited, others not), the much-ridiculed Danish royal family portrait, and masterpieces of modern art made from toast. Here they are, the best In The Air stories of 2013.
– In February, the very first of former U.S. President George W. Bush’s paintings — a pair of nude self-portraits set in his bathtub and shower — were revealed to the world, setting in motion a year-long obsession with the failed politician’s minor achievements at the easel.
– We sought out the aesthetic opinion of another U.S. President — Theodore Roosevelt— on the occasion of the Armory Show’s centennial, perusing the former chief of state’s review of the historic exhibition, in which deemed Marcel Duchamp’s infamous “Nude Descending a Staircase” less compelling than the Navajo rug hanging in his bathroom.
– The Norwegian artist Ida Skivenes made our mouths water in March with her series of toast-based artworks based on classics of modern art history, from Mark Rothko and Piet Mondrian, to Edvard Munch and Jackson Pollock.
– As the slow New York summer of group shows got underway, we picked our favorites based solely on their most distinctive features — their titles — crowning “I want that inside me.” at Feature Inc. the season’s best, before publishing an addendum in which Marianne Boesky’s “Sunsets and Pussy” prevailed.
– We found a really easy way to earn an invitation to James Turrell’s under-construction volcano crater lair: You just need to visit all 82 of the large-scale projects (in 26 countries) covered in his forthcoming book “The Turrell World Tour.” Easy.
– At the height of the Lady Gaga-Marina Abramovic mania this summer, a parody news website “revealed” that the performance artist has actually been playing an elaborate prank on the pop artist, fake news that many of our readers apparently took as real because it was so hilariously plausible.
– South African artist Reshma Chhiba’s “walk-in vagina” installation, created on the occasion of the country’s Women’s Month festivities, rubbed members of South Africa’s Hindu population the wrong way.
– On September 1, an audacious art crime rocked the community of Sedro-Woolley, Washington: A 22-year-old male, naked and bleeding, broke into the Sedro-Woolley Museum and began reorganizing the objects in its storage facility.
– In a less disturbing incident involving a naked man in his 20s at a museum, the opening of the “Masculine/Masculine” show of male nudes at the Musée d’Orsay was attended by a 26-year-old gay rights supporter identified only as Arthur G., who walked around the opening in the buff before a security guard asked him to get dressed, which he did.
– An exhibition by Chicago-based artist Kurt Hentschlager at Pittsburgh’s 943 Gallery was shut down after the immersive installation called “Zee” caused three visitors to suffer seizure-like attacks.
– Jeff Koons made a nude sculpture of Lady Gaga with a strategically placed gazing ball for the cover of her new album “ARTPOP.”
– Thomas Kluge’s portrait of the Danish royal family, with its incomprehensible lighting, Photoshop-like discontinuities, and and creepy children, was crowned the strangest and most compelling royal portrait of the 21st century.
– The court decision paving the way for the demolition of New York’s graffiti center 5Pointzset an important precedent for future efforts to preserve graffiti murals.
– We stalked Leonardo DiCaprio for about an hour during Art Basel in Miami Beach’s VIP preview, and it was actually quite boring.
– Our two longest-running series, “Art World Missed Connections” and “Instagrams of the Art World,” continued to turn up online ephemera chronicling art-lovers’ travels and loves.
