What do people do on the Friday before Memorial Weekend? They don’t seem to read or write news, so we went to reddit in search of links. It’s slow there too. Here’s what we got.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Seriously, this guy is the master of shadow puppets.

You know the guy in a speedo at basketball games? Here’s his story. Describing his creation: “I wanted it to be something like a blooming flower…I wanted to let Jackie Manuel know he’d met his match.”

We found some other stuff too.

From the source website: “try and put a negative spin on this one, anti-gunners.”

Happy Friday!

Yayoi Kusama is having one busy year. Her major retrospective at the Tate closes June 5th and will travel to the Whitney. Then there’s her collaboration with Louis Vuitton, which was announced just this week. Everything is on the up-and-up for the 83-year-old artist, assuming she doesn’t care about the amount of recent press devoted to her craziness. With Kusama’s exhibitions and fashion line, more people are coming out of the woodwork to discuss her notoriety as a kook—which includes living in a psychiatric ward across the street from her studio.

Earlier this year, ARTINFO wrote about Kusama’s life in a mental institution, but since then, there’s been a torrent of new public admissions about the artist’s dottiness. Marc Jacobs, in a YouTube advert for Louis Vuitton, mentioned that Kusama is “special” and “charming”; in a meeting with Jacobs, she showed him a Vuitton Ellipse handbag (pricetag $1,470) that she’d covered in hand-painted dots. Artist Steven Heller, too, has revelled in Kusama’s battiness, writing in The Atlantic that even in the 1960s, he “initially mistook [her] as simply crazy.” The Tate has been participating in this saga by screening KUSAMA: Princess of Polka Dots, a new documentary which shows Kusama in a red wig and full-on dot garb.

We expect to see more anecdotes in the months leading up to Kusama’s opening at the Whitney. And all this focus on Kusama’s personal life is bound to bring on two camps of opinion: those who think her craziness is evidence of her genius, and those who think it debases her art into something pithless. Count us in the latter camp. Sure, we may want some mystery, or magic, from art, but we don’t expect or need it from the artist.

Jace Clayton (DJ /rupture) just released his Sufi Plug Ins v1.0, and it’s one of the few digital tools I’ve seen that I would also consider art.  It’s a tool that is not only designed to help musicians make new sounds, but also to self-consciously influence what is produced. Interface design decisions are guided both by functionality concerns and the creative expression of its maker.

The Sufi Plug Ins suite is comprised of seven free audio tools designed to work with the music software Ableton Live. According to Clayton’s blog it offers “four distinct synthesizers hardwired to North African & Arabic maqam scales with quartertone tuning built-in, a device called Devotion which lowers your computer’s volume 5 times a day during call to prayer (presets include Agnostic, Fervent, Devout), and a drone machine. The interface is written in the Berber language of Tamazight, using their neo-Tifinagh script. Rollover info texts provide fragments of Sufi poetry (plus a little Jean Toomer).”

In other words, it’ll create a lot of sounds you’ve probably never heard before, and use different presets from what you’re used to. Whatever is made from these tools won’t be what we expect. It’s the only tool I know of that does anything like this—other than perhaps Kid Pix—and it’s pretty great. I can’t wait to see what experimental musician Phill Niblock does with this thing.

Clayton has a good explain-y post on his blog about how the Sufi Plug-ins grew of out of his experiences in Barcelona, but an essay he wrote on NYFA Current seven years ago contains a lot of the conceptual meat that sparked the project. In it, Clayton ruminates on whether sampling can be a truly collaborative process.

Sampling maintains cultural distance; collaborations require closeness. The difference is huge. It’s the difference between one-way cultural flow and the kind of dialogue that could lead to real community.

Proper collaborations offer much more than sampling, but even they aren’t untroubled. World music festivals love “fusion” groups whose members draw on diverse backgrounds to produce an anodyne sound seemingly intended to reassure the predominantly Western, middle-class festival audience: world music as foreign music with its distinctive features rubbed off, now suitable for mass consumption anywhere on the globe; difference with a jazzy backbeat you can groove to; the exotic but never the extreme.

He goes on to discuss the synthetic approach of Pop music, ruminates a little on iconoclasm, and eventually concludes that he feels limited by electronic music. “I was unsatisfied,” he writes, “with the narrative poles of electronic music—loop-based dance pieces or abstract/ambient pieces without storytelling force.” In other words, where was the back and forth that happens in actual conversation? Why is community so frequently defined by those we already know?

The best part of this is that there’s not even a whiff of lipservice within to Clayton’s pursuit of more meaningful collaborations. Take a look at the Sufi website and you’ll see the development team is prioritizing building compatibility with Cubase & Fruity Loops—software most widely used in Africa, the Middle East and South America—over Western favorites like ProTools. That’s great news, because it demonstrates a commitment to cultural exchange that flows both ways.

Illustration of Renzo Piano's plan for the new Whitney Museum, overlooking the High Line. (Image via: inhabitat.com)

The Guerilla website franchisers over at Whitney2012.org have issued another mock announcement under the guise of the Whitney. It’s a doozy. The fake museum claims they’ve taken control of the fake site, in order to preserve the honor of their sponsors.

This comes as a reaction to news of the Whitney’s recent actual request for donations from blue-chip artists of work valued over $500,000. The works will be sold at Sotheby’s this November to support its upcoming downtown move and Sotheby’s is a major sponsor. Fundraising for the move is aimed at $720 million.

The Whitney’s mock voice has its hammier moments, with polarizing language which makes it hard to imagine a Whitney Museum administrator taking seriously. Names like “Chairman Simone Franc” and “Count de Monet,” set the tone at farce. Sentences like, “The boardroom is the inviolate sanctuary of the one percent and the Museum cannot allow its mirror shine to be tarnished any further by the dirty boots of workers” nearly evoke eye rolling.

This is too bad, because it takes away from other passages that baldly communicate what the museum is doing by pairing with Sotheby’s. “The Museum is pleased to continue to do business with Sotheby’s after their generous sponsorship of this year’s Biennial, and unreservedly supports Sotheby’s attempt to break the union of its art handlers by locking them out of their jobs,” reads an opening line in the release. If we lived in a better world, that would just be satire. Today, it’s a statement of fact.

• There’s a line in the movie Manhattan where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are discussing a Castelli show. You don’t see the work, but it goes like this: “You liked the plexiglass sculpture? How about the steel box?” “The steel box was wonderful, it had a marvelous negative capability. The rest of the stuff downstairs was bullshit.” Josiah McElheny’s Some thoughts about the abstract body is kind of what you’d imagine that show to look like. [Andrea Rosen]
• The Brooklyn Museum has announced a crowd-curated exhibition! September 8-9th, Brooklyn artists will open their studios, and the community will decide what goes in the exhibition. via: Julia Kaganskiy [Go]
• Following the T-Rex skeleton sale this week, another auction peddles a vial of Ronald Reagan’s blood, along with Bieber hair and Ally McBeal PJs. The sale of the blood was thwarted by the threat of legal action from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, which then lead the seller to donate the item to the Foundation. [via: Marina Galperina, Corinna Kirsch, Kyle Chayka, Wonkette]
• Lance Esplund writes an obit for the Lower Merion Barnes Foundation site. [Bloomberg]
• An unmarked Starbucks will pose as a cafe, with wine. [Voice]
• The Voice’s new “The People Trying to Ruin The Internet” series is a must-read for people who use the internet. [Voice]
• Hundreds of foodies nearly perished on Sunday when stranded for hours in Brooklyn without wine, beer, and snacks at GoogaMooga, the celebrity chef and music fest. They tweeted a wildfire of complaints, and now “ExtraMooga” ticketholders will receive a full refund. The festival apologizes for not having provided extra mooga. [TimeOutNY]

A rebours (“Against the Grain”), installation view, Venus Over Manhattan

This week at The L Magazine I discuss Adam Lindemann’s show a rebours at Venus Over Manhattan. You know what? I mostly like it.

Visiting Venus Over Manhattan up on 77th and Madison feels a little like discovering a glittering mausoleum. The gallery space is dark with spotlighted objects, and its walls are fake-raw: though the cement floor is filled with gashes and holes and the drywall is exposed, there’s not so much as a nick from the installation process, and the screws have been perfectly screwed. The floor has even been treated with that special gallery gloss.

In short, it’s impossible to forget you’re in rich-person land. The exhibition design decisions simply underscore the exhibition conceit: the show is a 21st-century remaking of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel A rebours (“Against the Grain”), a story about a millionaire and aesthete who, in his disdain for the bourgeois, attempts to create an ideal artistic world in the form of a tomb. Gallery owner, curator and collector Adam Lindemann plays the role of Jean des Esseintes, chronicling the character’s unusual erotic desires and tastes through art.

To read the full review click here.

Cute baby tigers have invaded the Lower East Side! Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard has brought the joy of two tigers—surrounded by designer adult diapers—into Ramiken Crucible. It’s all for his current show IDEAL POLE. And from what we’ve seen on Instagram, it seems like these two furballs have been getting into some YouTube-worthy trouble by ripping up their play area and lounging around with stuffed animals.

We have no clue what the city by-laws are for housing exotic animals, but we’re going because the Bronx Zoo won’t let you get this close to a tiger. A word of warning though: despite the undoubtable charm of these furry little things, the rest of the exhibition won’t be so G-rated. Apparently, the show has something to do with barebacking and Jesus. IDEAL POLE closes at Ramiken Crucible on July 8th, but the tigers will leave on June 3rd.

Cash money.

Whether you’re a collector, a dealer, or just an observer, the art market can be a confusing place. Right now, since we’re in yet another art bubble, it’s a very expensive confusing place. Like most expensive confusing places, it’s full of people who want your money, and who would like you to believe that giving it to them constitutes a wise investment.

So, to commemorate the launch of artnet’s new art market index and the eruption of ill-advised bright ideas that’s sure to follow, we’re here to remind you that art will probably never make you any money.

Here are nine published statements from economists who have studied the art market professionally, with numbers and math and everything, categorized into four general lessons to be learnt from academia.

1. Art is a terrible investment, unless art investment is your full-time job.

Mandel, B. (2009) “Art as an Investment and Conspicuous Consumption Good”

“The empirical literature measuring average art prices is extensive, and the estimated long-run real return on art is quite low.”

…

“These studies find that art often underperforms relative to equities and bonds. While there have been stunning individual success stories in art investment, long-term average returns are lower than for equity and, in several cases, the mean real return of “risk-free” government bonds exceeds that of art, implying a negative risk premium.” [Ed.: That is, investing in art is less safe than investing in bonds, and also less profitable.]

Worthington, A. and H. Higgs (2003) “Art as an investment: short and long-term comovements in major painting markets”

“Unfortunately, little empirical evidence exists concerning short and long-term price linkages among differing art and financial markets and the concomitant prospects for portfolio diversification. The evidence that does exist is generally mixed.”

Goetzmann, W.N. (1993) “Accounting for Taste: Art and Financial Markets over Three Centuries.”

“While returns to art investment have exceeded inflation for long periods, and returns in the second half of the 20th century have rivalled the stock market, they are no higher than would be justified by the extraordinary risks they represent.”

Agnello, R. (2002) “Investment Returns and the Risk for Art: Evidence from Auctions of American Paintings”

“In contrast to the anecdotal evidence on returns, economic studies of painting investment have not supported claims of financial success.”

Melnik, A.L. and S. E. Plaut (2008) “Art as a Component in Investment Portfolios”

A small but growing body of academic research has addressed the question of whether art  should be a part of an optimal investment portfolios and, if so, to what extent. Frey and  Pommerehne (1989) examine an interesting sample that stretches over 350 years and conclude  that painting investments yielded on average a 1.5% real return, less than financial assets. In other recent papers, such as Renneboog and Van Houtte (2002), the conclusion has been that it should be at most in very small proportions and indeed may well be absent altogether from optimal portfolios (or even shorted).

2. If someone uses the term “masterpiece” to refer to a work of art, it has probably already peaked.

Ashenfelter, O. and K. Graddy (2002) “Auctions and the Price of Art”:

“The evidence clearly suggests that, contrary to the view of the art trade, “masterpieces” underperform the market.”

Moses, M. and J. Mei (2002) “Art as an Investment and the Underperformance of Masterpieces”:

“There is strong evidence of underperformance of masterpieces, meaning expensive paintings tend to underperform the art market index.”

3. If anything works, it’s probably buying and holding.

Landes, W. (2000) “Winning the Art Lottery: The Economic Returns to the Ganz Collection”:

“As the title “Winning the Art Lottery” implies the Ganzes turned a modest investment in art over a 50-year period into a collection worth more than $250 million. Yet the term “lottery” doesn’t quite capture the journey they traveled or the way they succeeded. They didn’t hit the jackpot overnight. Rather they spent a good deal of time and effort searching and acquiring art over many years. And like long-term investors in general, they had enough confidence in their purchases that they followed a “buy and hold” strategy. Occasionally they exchanged works for other works but they rarely sold art. They held only three of the 83 sampled works auctioned in 1986, 1988 and 1997 for less than 10 years. They held seventy-three for more than 20 years.”

4. Art market bubbles occur “whenever income inequality rises quickly.”

Goetzmann, W.N., L. Renneboog, and C. Spaenjers (2009) “Art and Money”:

“Taken together, these results demonstrate that it is indeed the wealth of the wealthy that drives art prices. This implies that we can expect art booms whenever income inequality rises quickly. This seems exactly what we witnessed during the last period of strong art price appreciation, 2002-2007. Indeed, in many countries with  large numbers of art buyers, income inequality has risen significantly in those years, mainly due to strong increases in managerial compensation. Andy Warhol, for one, would probably have applauded this evolution: “I don’t think everybody should have money. It shouldn’t be for everybody—you wouldn’t know who was important” (Warhol, 1975).”

The Avant/Garde Diaries is a digital portrait magazine that invites leading creatives to talk about the cutting edge of art, design, fashion, music and film. In each digital portrait, featured diarists are asked to introduce someone or something they consider to be ahead of their time. The result is a collection of very personal snapshots that celebrate new ways of thinking and spread inspiration. Be sure to check out the complete video portrait library at theavantgardediaries.com.

One recent video, “Taking Chances,” features Swiss pro snowboarder Nicolas Mueller and L.A. based action sports manager Circe Wallace. The two met in Muellers picturesque hometown Laax in Switzerland, went snowboarding and spoke about taking risks and the need in recognizing chances.

Find out more at avantgardediaries.com or facebook.com/avantgardediaries

Whitney Groundbreaking with Michael Bloomberg, Adam Weinberg, Robert Hurst, Neil Bluhm, Brooke Garber Neidich, and Kate Levin

I guess we know why Whitney Director Adam D. Weinberg was willing to say the museum had no intention “to respond one way or the other” about Sotheby’s art handler lockout. This morning we received a tip that the Whitney is planning an auction through Sotheby’s to fund the construction of their new building. Donated works will kick off the Sotheby’s day and evening sales on November 12-14, 2012. The Museum is asking selected blue-chip artists for donations of work worth over $500,000 and their total goal is $15 million.

While we support the museum’s construction efforts, we find the use of Sotheby’s unacceptable and are asking artists to refuse the Whitney’s requests for donations. Sotheby’s has locked out their handlers and is demanding the gutting of the art handlers’ union, the elimination of health insurance and other benefits, and the replacement of full-time skilled workers with temporary unskilled laborers. They are making these demands in the midst of another year of record-breaking profits.

The Whitney’s decision to use Sotheby’s should be cause for great embarrassment. The museum has other choices and should have explored them. Surely Christie’s could have just as easily managed that sale; multiple board members at the Whitney have direct ties to Christie’s, and Whitney trustee Casey Wasserman just sold a portion of his grandparents’ collection at the auction house last fall. Holding this auction in a way that supports workers might have been very easy.

But now it’s not, and we’re asking artists to help. If you’re being asked to donate work to the Whitney, refuse to do it unless the museum uses a different auction house. Sign our petition, and when you do, send us an email and let us know. The museum doesn’t have to use Sotheby’s, a company bent on exploiting its workers. It’s doing so because no one’s made it clear to them that they shouldn’t.