Guerrilla projections highlight workers concerns.

“Open for Exploitation”: Artists Project Messages on Guggenheim Museum Ahead of Reopening, by Hakim Bishara, Hyperallergic.com, September 29, 2020

The artist-activist groups Artists for Workers and the Illuminator organized the projections in solidarity with the Guggenheim’s unionized workers and workers of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

A guerrilla projection on the Guggenheim Museum’s facade, reading “Seeking New Management” (all images from Illuminator)

Yesterday, September 28, the artist-activist groups Artists for Workers (AFW) and the Illuminator descended on the Guggenheim Museum in New York for a series of guerrilla projections on its facade. The action was held in solidarity with the Guggenheim’s unionized workers and workers of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi ahead of the museum’s New York reopening this week (September 30 for members and October 3rd for the general public).

Traffic was scarce on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue when an old white van parked in front of the Guggenheim at 7:40pm last night. The vehicle, retrofitted to raise a large projector through an opening in its roof, belonged to the Illuminator. This is the third time that the group directed its projector at the Guggenheim’s spiral structure: It did it with the group Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.) in 2016 and 2014, and with Visual AIDS in 2015.

Members of the Illuminator setting up their projector in front of the Guggenheim

Read more here.

Wife’s prank on sleeping husband goes viral. Read the whole story on CNN here.

Meet the man, His Excellency President Kevin Baugh, who runs his own country, the Republic of Molossia, inside the U.S.
h/t Eli Gesner

Click to watch a video on Instagram from @cnn

Alternative animated video about The Republic of Molossia

Bank Robber Prank yields fun for some and felony charge for others. Pretending to rob a bank is a YouTube prank “genre”. These guys had fun…

Bank Robber Prank, September 20, 2019 (Over 10M views on YouTube)

These guys, not so much. Stokes twins BANK ROBBER PRANK (gone wrong), March 30, 2020

And, then…

Twin YouTube Stars Alan and Alex Stokes Charged with Felonies After Staging Bank Robbery Pranks, by Ashley Boucher, People, August 5, 2020

Twin YouTubers have been charged with felony counts after they pretended to be bank robbers for prank videos filmed in California last year.

Alan and Alex Stokes, 23, are each facing a felony count of false imprisonment effected by violence, menace, fraud, or deceit and one misdemeanor count of falsely reporting an emergency, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office announced in a press release Wednesday.

The twins are accused of dressing in all black and wearing ski masks while carrying around duffel bags of cash last October.

According to the DA’s office, Alan and Alex ordered an Uber driver while posing as bank robbers on October 15, beginning the caper around 2:30 p.m. The driver refused to drive them, and a bystander believed they were trying to carjack the Uber driver.

When police arrived, they ordered the Uber driver out of the car at gunpoint, releasing him when they realized he was not involved. Read the whole story here.

“There shall be no golden idols…”

Golden ‘Statues’ Memorializing Donald Trump’s Most Divisive Moments Have Popped Up Around Washington, DC, Courtesy of an Ad Guru, Sarah Cascone, ArtNet News, July 21, 2020

Bryan Buckley hopes to remind voters of just how poorly Trump has handled the challenges of 2020.

Bryan Buckley, Now Go Back to School. Photo courtesy of the Trump Statue Initiative.

Big, shiny, gold statues of Donald Trump sound like they would be right up the president’s alley—but a new art project, titled the “Trump Statue Initiative,” uses the figures to instead memorialize his worst moments of 2020.

Street performers painted head-to-toe in metallic gold paint posed as still as stone atop massive plinths that hailed Trump as the “destroyer of civil rights and liberties.” The trio of “statues” appeared over the weekend in sites across Washington, DC.

Filmmaker Bryan Buckley decided to stage the project in part because of the way public statues have made headlines all summer, with activists outraging Trump with their efforts to remove memorials to Confederate leaders and other problematic historical figures. In response, the president has not only beefed up the law against vandalizing statues, but also issued an executive order to create a “National Garden of American Heroes.”

Bryan Buckley, The Bunker. Photo courtesy of the Trump Statue Initiative.

“I noticed that Trump was obsessed with statues,” Buckley told AdAge. “I felt like the best thing we could do was to create these very honest statues of the legacy he’s living right now, that let the world see exactly who he is.” Read the whole article here.

Founders Sing says, “The worst among us have come together to record a charity single to benefit… themselves!”

Watch the video:

From @rebecca.solnit: “John Lewis, bigger than Robert E. Lee, Richmond, VA, last night.”

It doesn’t take much to provoke knee jerk reactions…
h/t Eli

The Troll: A fake flag burning at Gettyburg was only his latest hoax, by Shawn Boburg and Dalton Bennett, Washington Post, July 17, 2020

A Berner Sanders supporter has provoked the far right for years using online aliases, sometimes with dangerous results.

Watch the video

Adam Rahuba, a former concert promoter, works part-time as a food-delivery driver and a DJ. At 38, he spent most of the past year staying on a friend’s couch in a small town north of Pittsburgh.

A Washington Post investigation found that Rahuba is also the anonymous figure behind a number of social media hoaxes — the most recent played out in Gettysburg on Independence Day — that have riled far-right extremists in recent years and repeatedly duped partisan media outlets.

Rahuba once claimed that activists were planning to desecrate a Confederate cemetery in Georgia, The Post found. He seeded rumors of an organized effort to report Trump supporters for supposed child abuse. And he promoted a purported grass-roots campaign to confiscate Americans’ guns.

These false claims circulated widely on social media and on Internet message boards. They were often amplified by right-wing commentators and covered as real news by media outlets such as Breitbart News and the Gateway Pundit.

The hoaxes, outlandish in their details, have spurred fringe groups of conspiracy-minded Americans to action by playing on partisan fears. They have led to highly combustible situations — attracting heavily armed militia members and far-right activists eager to protect values they think are under siege — as well as large mobilizations of police. Read the rest of the article here.

TikTok’s @fishie.fish tells the hilarious story of what happened after she signed up to attend Trump’s fatefully under-attended rally in Tulsa…

Watch the video retweated by The Lincoln Project

Jimmy Kimmel presents “Mr Baby Trump” who never ever ever does anything wrong…
h/t Andrea & Linda

In an attempt to piss gas on a fire, Sacha Baron Cohen’s fake redneck band croons disturbingly racist lyrics to a receptive crowd.

Sacha Baron Cohen Led a Far-Right Militia Group in a Deeply Racist Singalong, by Gabrielle Bruney, Esquire, June 29, 2020

Disguised in padded overalls and a hat, the prankster infiltrated the Washington Three Percent rally this weekend.

Back in 2018, Sacha Baron Cohen slapped down suggestions that his Showtime political prank series Who Is America? would return for a second season. The show, which found him adopting a variety of disguises in order to attempt to dupe Americans, particularly right wing political figures, into doing horrifyingly offensive and just plain ridiculous stuff—naturally hinged on the element of surprise. “We relied on the fact that no one was expecting me,” he told Deadline in 2018. “I hadn’t done anything undercover for over a decade and so nobody thought, ‘Oh wait a minute, is this a Sacha Baron Cohen character?’” With everyone aware that Baron Cohen is back in the wigs and prosthetic noses business, it didn’t seem likely that he’d be trying anything soon.

But that’s exactly what he would say, right, if he wanted to throw people off his trail. Because Baron Cohen may be back to his old stunts, as Variety confirmed that he was behind Saturday’s high-effort trolling of a right-wing event.

On Saturday, Olympia, Washington hosted a rally for militia group the Washington Three Percent. The organization’s leader, Matt Marshall, told NPR that a week before the event, a mysterious organization called Back to Work USA contacted the Three Percent and offered to pay for the rally and book country star Larry Gatlin to perform. It all seemed to be going as planned, until a late-comer bluegrass band took the stage. The unusually accented lead singer, wearing what appeared to be suspiciously padded overalls and a cowboy hat, lead the thin crowd in a sing-a-long whose lyrics included, “Journalists, what we gonna do? Chop them up like the Saudis do.” Read the whole story here.

A British Public Information Film on the threat of Coronavirus, released in the 1970s by CheeksProductions. h/t Eli Gesner

Sarah Cooper nails it…again

FISH NEED BETTER HOMES!

This April, 2020, Miami Hispanic Cultural Arts Center presents
“Closed: SOS Mother Earth”

A virtual exhibition in honor of Earth Day, featuring
Joey Skaggs Fish Condos

See it here on Facebook (public link) and here on Instagram.
The exhibit will soon also be on their website.

Here’s a tease…

Read about the exhibition in El Nuevo Herald (in Spanish).

From the great inventor of useless machines, Joseph’s Machines

JOSEPH’S MACHINES solve everyday problems using familiar objects in unfamiliar ways. He creates them in his apartment in Brooklyn, New York. This was a two-month collaboration between Joseph and chain-reaction artist Lyle Broughton.

Use this fool-proof method for completely safe, germ-free passing of condiments across the table.