The long-standing legal battle between the city's artists and Department of Parks and Recreation has started to heat up.

Yesterday, the city's artist vendors asked Richard J. Sullivan, U.S. District Judge of the Southern District of New York, to consider new evidence in their suit against the city.

That new evidence? They claimed via letter that the Department is unfairly and illegally prohibiting craftsmen and artisans from selling their wares in city parks, since entertainers are allowed to perform for money again.

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Last week the Voice brought you news that the City had reversed a decision prohibiting virtually all entertainers from performing in New York's parks.

That mandate, which stemmed from "expressive matter vending rule," was used against performers starting in 2010, after the city carried out a controversial crackdown on artist vendors with the same regulation.

As it stands, the city's artisans and craftspeople currently must stick to certain locations in spaces controlled by the Department of Parks and Recreation. Judging from the language of the rule, though, it's unclear why this no longer applies to performers but still applies to artists.

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In summer 2010, New York enacted rules limiting the location of artist vendors in city parks, a move which has since become the subject of a lawsuit.

The city then applied this same "expressive matter vending" rule to entertainers. Officials used the mandate to crack down on park performers, especially targeting those in Washington Square.

The pols' basic claim was that change dropped in a musician's hat was the same thing as buying work from a photographer or painter. So, performers within 50 feet of a monument or fountain or 5 feet of a bench or tree -- pretty much the whole park -- could get ticketed just like visual artists.

The Voice has just gotten word that the city seems to have reversed its decision to apply this rule to performers. But, it looks like these vending rules still apply to visual artists, who have long fought with the city for the right to display their wares.

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Sam Levin

City Councilman Jimmy Van Brammer with Sen. Chuck Schumer, representatives from Kaufman Studios, and other local elected officials.

New York City is oh so very close to being a better city for film and television than Hollywood -- if the federal government would just get out of the damn way!

At least that was the message today on the corner of 36th Street in Astoria, Queens, where Sen. Chuck Schumer, flanked by relevant neighborhood politicians, called on the National Park Service to stop making it difficult for a local film company to build New York City's first-ever outdoor studio.

This project -- which would convert 36th Street between 34th and 35th avenues into a movie studio lot -- apparently could make all the difference in attracting filmmakers and production companies to New York City, instead of Los Angeles, or Toronto, or New Orleans. That means, you guessed it, lots of jobs and economic development, all on one block in Queens.

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wikipedia

Sotheby's made over $14 million from a single sale yesterday

As you may have heard, Sotheby''s had a good day yesterday, auctioning off Edward Munch's "The Scream" for a record $119.9 million dollars.

Not having such a good day? The still locked-out art handlers at Sotheby's, who appeared as number 84 on the Voice's list of the "100 Most Powerless New Yorkers" last January and have been locked out from the auction house for nine months now.

In a nut shell, Sotheby's thinks it offered its workers a fair contract for the business it is doing last summer. As the website Flavorwire summarized of the other side, the unionized workers see it a bit differently:

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@cxcart

When Facebook bought Instagram, the photo app that makes images look vintage yet picture perfect, for $1 billion, the tech world was stunned. Not because Instagram is a two-year-old startup, but because no one realized that this young app—which simply consists of taking pictures and that surely anyone with a smartphone has downloaded—had that much power.

Now, the W Times Square, in partnership with Instagram NYC, will exhibit images from some of the most talented Instagram photographers in the first-ever Instagram photo exhibition, which opens tomorrow. We couldn't help but wonder whether an Instagram image qualifies as art. But we caught up with Brian DiFeo, curator and founder of Instagram NYC, who hand-selected photographers ranging from professionals to multimedia artists and asked him what an Instagram exhibition actually entails. He says artists were asked to capture New York's most fascinating structures and urban creativity. From what we've seen, the images themselves are pretty remarkable, considering they were taken with a phone. No wonder Kodak went bankrupt. More >>

via nolongerempty.org

Actors in Theatre of the Oppressed's upcoming production in the Bronx.

When directors with Theatre of the Oppressed NYC asked a group of teenage girls to strike a pose that they think represents the Bronx, most of them did the same thing: They chose images with weapons.

This is how artist Melanie Crean remembers a workshop with around ten teenage girls in the Bronx, who were then in the early stages of creating a play that they will perform in front of a live audience this coming week.

"[Violence] is a very real part of their lives that is not necessarily getting discussed and analyzed in schools or elsewhere," Crean told the Voice. "We're starting to...get people talking about problems, so we can start to think about solutions."

This is part of the unique process of Theatre of the Oppressed NYC, a nonprofit group on the rise that collaborates with organizations throughout the city to create original productions with communities that face some kind of oppression or discrimination.

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Eugene de Salignac, Department of Bridges/Plant & Structures

From October 7, 1914. Brooklyn Bridge showing painters on suspenders.

Hundreds of thousands of photos that offer snapshots of more than a century of New York City history are now publicly available online for the first time ever.

Together, they offer a close-up, gritty picture of the city's history and development, from detective photos of gruesome crime scenes to Depression-era shots of everyday life to the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

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Oh, my. We're not sure how we missed this story out of Sweden last week (which makes that country's Girl With The Dragon Tattoo read like Cinderella in comparison), but thanks to Channing Kennedy and Jorge Rivas at Color Lines, it came screaming at us this Monday morning.

So here's what appears to be, at first glance, something of a simple question:

When you combine someone painting themselves dark in blackface, putting their blackened face at the head of a cake made in the shape of a woman's body, then have someone else perform a female circumcision on the body and feed the baked-good genitals to the screaming, writhing blackfaced head, what's at play here?

Is it racism, sexism, or art? Or some bizarre combination of all three?

When this happened in Sweden of all places, last week, it turned out to be a not so simple question the more you delve into it.

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Legacy Russell

This past summer we wrote about Legacy Russell, an artist embarking on a year-long project that in its different phases (called "rites") explores the nature of memory in the East Village and the Lower East Side. When we first met Russell she was working on the first "rite" -- the "Rite of Remembrance" -- in which she sat in Tompkins Square Park taking down people's stories of the neighborhood. Now, Russell is in the midst of the third "rite," the "Rite of Rearrangement" in which she takes portraits of people in a local site of their choosing. She will eventually print those portraits out as large scale black and white images that can be hung up as public sculpture. The rite "is going to be an opportunity for people to look at and evaluate their personal geography," she told Runnin' Scared this week.

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