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Recent newsworthy works of art: a toilet brush, soon to be available for around $30 in the U.S., from the noted French designer Philippe Starck, who calls the work “the apotheosis of my career”; a cage of spiders, snakes, scorpions, and frogs devouring each other as a testament to a Darwinian world, from Chinese artist Huang Yon Ping at a show in Paris last November; and a poem about U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, in an Iraqi newspaper in October (“Why do you hate the day and love the night? Albright, don’t put out the light”).
From an Artforum review of a Helmut Federle show, quoted in October in a New York Times article on mundane art criticism: “Federle’s grouping of works also suggests a kind of epigenesis of abstraction: each stage offers a greater, more exacting epiphany of the idea of abstraction as such and the essential consciousness–a consciousness that can recognize and deal with essences (in a Husserlian sense)–than the preceding one.”
The city council in Capao da Canoa, Brazil, voted in March to install Breathalyzer equipment at city hall, mainly because one member, Delci Romano, habitually shows up drunk and demands to cast votes on issues not on the agenda. And Katia Nogueira Tapeti was recently re-elected to city council in Colonia do Piaui, and is widely believed to be the most popular politician in the state’s history, despite the region’s macho culture and the fact that he’s a transvestite living openly with his gay “husband.”
New York Daily News photographer Dick Corkery, who had accused comedian Bill Cosby of roughing him up, called the federal court decision in New York City in August a “victory.” Because the court found Corkery almost totally at fault, it ordered Cosby to pay damages of ten cents on each of two charges.
