John Menick

Much to the relief of many New Yorkers, the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater, and Broadcasting decided to scrap its proposal to revise the city’s photography and permit laws. Inundated with stories from artists, journalists, amateur shutterbugs, concerned citizens, bloggers, libertarians, bird watchers, filmmakers, and regular folks, someone made a decent call downtown and backed off one of the most absurd proposals concerning public space in recent memory.

However, I have to say that I’m not confident that this will blip off our radar any time soon. The city is only proposing to redraft a new law, not back away from it entirely. It may be typical politics: test the waters with something outrageous, and scale back until people get tired of fighting or the city gets what it wanted in the first place. My feeling is that the NYPD just wants another excuse to search citizens, and there are plenty of ways to help facilitate that project. A watered-down version of the proposed legislation might do just fine.

Also of note: the above Times article mentions bird watcher D. Bruce Yolton and his website Urban Hawks. As I learned a couple of weeks ago from one of my commenters, in recent years birders all over the city have been unfairly targeted by police. Perhaps not unhappily, it’s been an unintended benefit of the legislation that so many people are learning about the rich and extremely vital NYC bird-watching community.

And then there’s also that awesome video.

As some of you who follow these things might know, the conceptual artist Michael Asher has been doing an ongoing project for the public art exhibition Skulptur Projekte Münster, in which he parks a trailer at various sites in the city. Asher started the project in 1977 for the first Projekte Münster, and he has repeated it for every iteration of the shown since. It’s been 30 years now, so the city has changed, but not the trailer. Here it is today, looking a little out of era:

Anyway, I don’t know what the carjacking rates are for Münster, but according to a blurb in ArtForum, the said trailer was stolen. Or, as ArtForum writes, the trailer “disappeared without a trace.” A short while later:

Police reported that the trailer had turned up in the town of Telgte, Germany, approximately six miles from Münster. An initial inspection found no damage to the work, which is an original. The trailer will undergo another inspection before being reinstalled in the exhibition.

A statistical fluke? Münster’s yearly carjacking strikes a conceptual artwork? Or something more ingenious, a meta-conceptual art heist pulled off by some disaffected German art students? Stay tuned…

From Yahoo News. One is art, the other, not. Maybe.