I cannot get over RBG
Some modernist sculptures in downtown Manhattan: Jean Dubuffet, Louise Nevelson, and Mark di Suvero.
The Yayoi Kusama balloon at this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade
Hyperallergic: What’s the story of Buddy the Rat? How did the character originate?
Jonothon Lyons: Twelve years ago, I was working for a theater company in Portland, Oregon called Imago Theater, and they have a show called Frogs, where we played big animal characters in masks. I played a frog, a polar bear, an anteater, and a penguin, but I never played a rat, and I always wanted to. In 2009, I made my own rat mask and went out in Times Square and ran around, put it up on YouTube, and it got around 70,000 views. It wasn’t gigantic, but it was enough that in the back of my mind I kept thinking, “I need to take this rat out again.”
Hyperallergic: I’ve just emerged from a rabbit hole of TikTok videos of you performing in the costume. They’re incredible, and they’re really resonating with people right now. How did Buddy go viral?
JL: I’m friends with this film director Todd Strauss-Schulson (Isn’t It Romantic, The Final Girls, A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas). I told him I had this rat character I’ve been wanting to do more with it, so we conceived of a little three and a half minute-long film. We shot it the week leading up to the election, in abandoned SoHo, as the windows were being boarded up — a very surreal and uncommon vision of New York. After the first night of shooting, a stranger had posted a video of me that got 1.7 million views that day. We wrapped up the movie, and over the next few days I started going out on my own and posting the content to TikTok and Instagram, and it really took off. >>more
Robert Arneson, “A Hollow Gesture” (1980), lithograph, 40 x 30 inches (photo: Cindy Bernhard, courtesy Phyllis Bramson)
Twitter user @MajorPazuzu has a hilarious meme take on the latest art restoration blunder coming out of Spain. Credit: @MajorPazuzu, used with permission
