Amir Baradaran Gives Tourists a Reason to Photograph Famous Art

As of yesterday, users of Frenchising Mona Lisa, an Augmented Reality (AR) smart phone application, can take Amir Baradaran's conceptual art anywhere. Focusing their camera phones on the eternally mysterious Da Vinci painting—the original in the Louvre or a reproduction anywhere—the technology shows the Italian maiden (superimposed over Baradaran's body) unfurl her hair and use some very manly hands to wrap a French flag around herself in the form of a hijab.
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Blips for VIPs: Technical Woes Plague Online Fair

If The Social Network, the Facebook flick, taught America one lesson, it was that a successful web site shall not crash. Given Art in America's weekend test-run of the VIP Art Fair, the world's first online art fair, let's call this one a beta. From the outset, functionality was sporadic. By midday Saturday an advisory note on the homepage read:

Due to the overwhelming number of visitors from around the world who have logged on to VIP Art Fair since its launch at 8am EST this morning, the Fair is currently experiencing slower than normal response rates. Please bear with us as we work to remedy this situation. Thank you.

At one point, the site completely shut down.

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The World Catches Up to Kenny Scharf

"I'm not a kid anymore, and it's kind of funny to have someone in their fifties running around spray-painting walls-but it's fun, I like to do it," says Kenny Scharf. He's not the only one. After putting up a mural on the Goldman Properties wall at Houston and Bowery—the site of Keith Haring's famous 1982 mural and subsequent treatments by Brazilian street artists Os Gemeos, Shepard Fairey, and Barry McGee—it was bombed (twice) by graffiti writers. Although going over someone's work is more or less the law of the street, especially at this spot (see: Fairy, Shepard), the controversy ratcheted up a notch this month when Tony Goldman installed security cameras at the site. "Spraypaint has this connotation of graffiti and graffiti has this connotation of gangs," says Scharf. "It scares some people."
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New Documentary Goes Into the Woodmans

Francesca Woodman's 1981 suicide at the age of 22 conferred on the artist and her haunting black-and-white self-portraits a cult status that resonates today. And while the tragedy introduced the work to a popular audience, it also colors comprehensive analysis. Through the years, the story of Woodman has prompted an abundance of filmmakers to approach Woodman's parents, the accomplished artists who manage the estate, with proposals for a documentary. All of them were denied, until television news producer C. Scott Willis made what he calls a "terrible social gaffe" at a 2004 brunch in Manhattan.
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