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Arsenal and Adidas enlist Stella McCartney to create a sustainable new collection.
“Arsenal has debuted a new collaboration with Stella McCartney, as part of its ongoing partnership with Adidas. The collaboration includes 10 pieces for the Arsenal women’s team—as well as a gender neutral pre-match jersey that will be worn by both men’s and women’s teams—that combine performance and sustainable innovations. As well as the jerseys, the collection includes a full zip hoodie, tight, and an exclusive colorway of the Stella McCartney x adidas Ultraboost 22. The collection arrives in a color palette of “Mystery Blue” and “Scarlet Red,” reflecting the club’s past and present colors, which are used in an oversized leopard graphic.” —[H/T Hypebeast]
Ai Weiwei makes his operatic debut with Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot in Rome.
“With a storyline seeping with bloodshed and despotism, a new geopolitical focus and Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv in the pit, the new production—originally meant to have premiered in 2020, but delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic—comes exactly on time. From the ominous opening five notes, the audience is plunged into an uncertain, violent world and 64-year-old Ai never lets up the pressure. The production, which opens at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, is a fitting project for an artist known for his installations, sculpture and photography that denounce authority and champion human rights and freedom of expression.” —[H/T France24]
A new Chrome extension can detect fake profile pictures with razor-sharp accuracy.
“V7 Labs has created a new artificial intelligence-based (AI) software that works as a Google Chrome extension that is capable of detecting artificially generated profile pictures—like the ones above—with a claimed 99.28% accuracy. V7 Labs is a software company that designs products made to automate visual tasks. The company says that the world relies on visual decision making and it is working towards making deep learning more robust and easier to develop so that any business can implement state-of-the-art AI from a single platform.” —[H/T PetaPixel]
Tech startup Fairchain aims to use digital contracts to get artists royalties for resale.
“Even before the artist Robert Rauschenberg famously objected to seeing a 1958 painting he originally sold for $900 flip for $85,000 in 1973, artists have been frustrated by not receiving royalties for their work when it changes hands. Previous efforts to address this over the years have failed. But now, as musicians and other creative producers assert more control over their future sales and blockchain technology has allowed for easier tracking of intellectual property, two Stanford alumni have started a business to help visual artists reap the financial rewards when their work is resold privately or comes up for auction, in some cases at many multiples of the original price. Charlie Jarvis, 24, a computer scientist, and Max Kendrick, 36, a former diplomat and a son of the sculptor Mel Kendrick, started the company, called Fairchain, in 2019. Little by little, it is gaining traction with artists and gallerists.” —-[H/T New York Times]
An artist spray-paints massive graffiti on the facade of Manhattan’s New Museum.
“The New Museum in Manhattan’s Lower East Side was spray-painted Wednesday morning, March 23, with massive graffiti on its facade. The black, white, and red graffiti spells the moniker ‘Acer’ in large block letters on the museum’s third level, facing Bowery Street. The graffiti was painted a few feet above artist Glenn Ligon’s installation A Small Band (2015), which features the writing “blues blood bruise.” Ligon was among 37 Black contemporary artists participating in the 2021 exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, originally conceived by the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor.” —[H/T Hyperallergic]
The Memphis airport has reinstalled a self-portrait by Tommy Kha after taking it down.
“An airport in Tennessee is reinstalling an art piece featuring an Asian man wearing an Elvis outfit after previously taking it down due to backlash from travelers. The self-portrait, which shows Asian American artist Tommy Kha dressed as Elvis, was chosen by a committee led by Memphis’ Urban Art Commission to be displayed in a newly renovated section of the Memphis-Shelby County Airport.” —[H/T Yahoo]
Today’s attractive distractions:
Selfridges morphs into an exhibition space dedicated to Op Art pioneer Victor Vasarely.
Luke Jerram crafts intricate glasswork modeled after the microbiology of fatal viruses.
Will bringing NFTs into vinyl give artists resale royalties from the secondhand market?
A dinosaur skeleton worth a staggering $32 million heads to a museum in Abu Dhabi.
