It seems like every month Pittsburgh gets name-checked on one hot list or another.
Brent Burket
Brent Burket is a writer and curator living in Brooklyn. His blog is called Heart As Arena, and he tweets here. He has a really bad sense of direction.
Posted inArt
A Play About Metalheads and Metal Hearts
La Mélancolie des dragons is a magical play from director Philippe Quesne and Vivarium Studio about a crew of inventive metalheads.
Posted inArt
Nurturing the Experimental Music Underground
There have been losses. Terrible losses. And yet, somehow the underground finds its way.
Posted inArt
Love It to Death: My Year in Music
The best work of 2016 in the land of metal, noise, avant rock, out-there jazz, and in-there experimental.
Posted inArt
My Year in Racket: An Eclectic Musical Look Back at 2013
Obviously, this list needs to go to 11.
Posted inMusic
For Ai Weiwei, Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word
We’ve been through this before. I’m a HUGE Ai Weiwei fan. He somehow continues to send out beautiful and challenging transmissions from behind the bonefart razor wall of oppression and torture that is the Chinese government. He was a 100 percenter as far as I was concerned, from intention to viewpoint to execution. Always on, never sorry. And then the music started. Golden art god, interrupted.
Posted inOpinion
No Supper for You! Ai Weiwei Goes Heavy Metal
Look, Ai Weiwei’s been through hell. But that doesn’t mean he needs to put the rest of us through it. And yet, here we are — “Dumbass” has arrived. In terms of metal, Ai Weiwei, in one song, has become the Billy Ray Cyrus of the genre. Billy Ray is about as country as Pat Boone was heavy metal. And as far as metal cred goes, Pat Boone was more believable than Ai.
Posted inArt
YouTube Archive + Anarchy, Part 3
For the third and final installment in his series of YouTube Essays, called YouTube Archive + Anarchy, blogger and curator Brent Burket pretty much goes for broke. If this doesn’t get you pumped about YouTube, or at least disturbed enough to stop using it for a few days, there’s no hope for you. From black metal to necrophilia, surrealism and Alice Cooper, these are the YouTube videos you only find at 2 in the morning after a night of heavy drinking. Also, Jeffrey Deitch gets punched and bitches out his attackers like Woody Allen in a pink suit.
Posted inArt
YouTube Archive + Anarchy, Part 2
For the second in his series of YouTube Essays, YouTube Archive + Anarchy, blogger and curator Brent Burket selects a mix of art and music, collecting YouTube music videos, amateur documentation of video art pieces and performance art. Check out a Katy Perry introduction and feminist firecracker Karen Finley invading a Sinead O’Connor song, to disastrous and hilarious effect. Click through for the complete VJ set.
Posted inArt
YouTube Archive + Anarchy, Part 1
For a fan of art like me, YouTube is a gold mine. I remember when I was in college about the only access I had to the art and music scene in New York City was pouring over the New York Times in the library. The rest was imagination. YouTube brings art and music closer, no matter where you are or when you are. It’s a crazy archive that holds art, new and old. Sometimes its been sanctioned by the artist. Sometimes, not so much. The best thing about art on YouTube is the access that it allows for the viewer and also because of the exposure for artists. Some artists and gallerists might have an issue with that last point. But quite frankly, that’s their problem. Click through for a journey into YouTube’s anarchic archive of art and artistic materials.
Posted inArt
Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s The YouTube: Archive & Anarchy
Starting Wednesday, Brooklyn blogger and curator Brent Burket will be curating a three-day YouTube retrospective that mines the insanity of the online video juggernaut to find gems and germs that are sometimes painful to watch but always entertaining. His mission was to present an array of short videos that would give us a taste of the art world there and wait till you see what he has discovered.
Paul Virilio has written extensively about how advances in technology have changed our relationship to time and space. YouTube has been supremely guilty of that crime, AND it’s allowed us to hit repeat it when necessary. Um, awesome …
Posted inArt
The Brucennial: Piece By Piece (Part 5 of 5)
And as soon as it started it is now concluded … in our final installment of the complete review of The Brucennial: 229. Lola Schnabel – Generation Next; 230. Tom Fruin – Didn’t like this until I saw the stitching. All our comforts, sewn together in a skin suit; 231. Shelly Silvers – Screen koan. This is really good. Loop solid …