Burning Man Bans Glitter: Last Week in Art

Also: The British Library rejects Taliban archives and Donald Trump gets painted as a giant turd.

August 31, 2015, 6:00pm

Image courtesy the artist Twitter

A lot went down this week in the weird and wild world of Art. Some things were more scandalous than others, some were just plain wacky—but all of them are worth knowing about. Without further ado:

+ Burning Man now has a rule against glitter and sequins. Festival organizers create the term “Matter Out of Place” for the new restrictions for costume that make debris. [New York Times]

+ New York Academy of Art students help the city's medical examiner's office sift through its backlog of 1,200 sets of unidentified remains by making forensic sculptures. [CBS]

+ Kanye for President in 2020. He mic-dropped this nugget of information at MTV’s VMAs. “And yes, as you probably could have guessed by this moment, I have decided in 2020 to run for president.” [New York Times]

+ Hansky paints Trump as an emoji-like character and tweets about it: “what a piece of shit. ‪@realDonaldTrump” [Twitter]

Image: Al Jazeera, via

+ The British Library rejects Taliban archives.The Taliban Sources Project has spent almost a decade collecting and translating everything from newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, and military documents to scraps of poetry written by Taliban soldiers, in the hopes of facilitating a better understanding of the fundamentalist Islamic group. [Art Net]

+Denmark’s earliest kings were also pirates. Of course. [Smithsonian]

+Thousands of Russians rallied in Saint Petersburg after a century-old Mephistopheles mythical demon was destroyed. "Art cannot offend anyone," added a 60-year-old woman. [Art Daily]

+Should Times Square replace it’s topless “performers” to make room for more cars? This is now an important public art conversation. [WNYC]

+ Takashi Murakami is an art collector. His private collection of works of art and everyday objects will go on display for the first time in January at the Yokohama Museum of Art. “Collecting is like an illness; I wouldn’t recommend it,” he says. [The Art Newspaper]