New England Journal of Aesthetic Research news headlines

Did you hear the one about the 83-year-old lady who came into Tiki Tattoo in Mansfield, Massachusetts, looking to get a dragonfly tattoo? “Her reply was, verbatim, ‘to piss my kids off,’” owner Don Howe told the Mansfield Patch. “She came back and got another one about a month and half later. I asked her how it went with her kids, and she said ‘It worked, they think I’m crazy!’”

“I would hope to see an expanded Bruce Museum with enlarged and dedicated spaces for both the Museum of Art and the Museum of Science,” Boston-native and former Wadsworth Atheneum director Peter C. Sutton says of his plans for the Bruce’s next decade as he finishes his first 10 years leading the Greenwich, Connecticut, museum.

Former Boston University psychology teacher Allan Teger’s photographs turn naked people into curious landscapes: “When you look at (the photograph), you think you understand it, then it slips in your head that’s the real point of the work – people can have more than one perception,”

Peter Diepenbrock of Jamestown, Rhode Island, unveils new 16-foot, twisting bronze and steel abstract sculpture at Lakewood Public Library in Ohio.

MassArt’s refurbished and expanded Kennedy Campus Center wins LEED Gold-CI certification.

Don Gorvett closed his Gloucester woodcut gallery this spring and opened Black Bear Fine Art on Shore Road in Ogunquit, Maine. “He closed Gloucester for a number of reasons, he says. First, he lives with and cares for his former eighth-grade teacher, now 97, and ’still my teacher,’ he notes, who prefers Ogunquit. Gloucester’s art culture was also a factor. ‘It was going to take too long to catch on there. …; They’re married to the School Ann style of art,’ he says. His work hangs in its museum, but his style doesn’t jive with the current market place. ‘I enjoyed it there, but Gloucester wasn’t that rewarding. So I said, “Let’s close up.” The move to Ogunquit simply made sense.’” On Dec. 17, he opened Piscataqua Fine Arts in Portsmouth, N.H.

Historic Boston refurbishes 1859 brick firehouse in Dudley Square, said to be “Boston’s oldest remaining firehouse,” and turns it into its headquarters.

“Gloucester is believed to have started the tradition of the large lobster trap [Christmas] tree when it built its first one in 2001. Janice Lufkin Shea, who was a Gloucester [Massachusetts] shopkeeper at the time, was frustrated that Main Street had no holiday display. She saw a tiny lobster trap tree in someone’s yard and thought a bigger version would be perfect for downtown.” (Via.)

Harvard and MIT alums team up to invent vending machine to sell underwear in Boston’s South Station. “I wanted to design something that addressed the problem of having to wait in line or having too much selection or paying too much for something,” said founder Gina Moro.

“Travel + Leisure” magazine looks for an expert on the “World’s Ugliest Public Art” and finds … “As the Boston art critic Greg Cook puts it, ‘Public art—even works we hate—should be given a chance. Years. Sometimes it takes a while for something to grow on you. Sometimes it takes a while just to figure something out.’” The article also appears on the Huffington Post.

Scottish artist Martin Boyce, whose sculpture “Through Layers and Leaves (Closer and Closer)” was completed at MIT’s David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research this year, has been awarded the 2011 Turner Prize.

“Many predicted the rise of the Internet and of social media would annihilate distance and overcome the constraints of place by allowing people to communicate and build virtual communities,” writes Richard Florida. “But the fact of the matter is Twitter actually works with and reinforces the power of place.”

Providence Daily Dose: “If you have ever had trouble explaining Fort Thunder to a stranger just memorize the first sentence of Greg Cook’s review in the Phoenix. It’s a great sentence.”

“A lot of people look at [my] paintings and think that they’re about being gay or about being queer and I try to remind them that they’re about being male, and that’s a different sort of thing,” says Boston painter Steve Locke. “I’m not opposed to being queer, I hope to be really good at it one day, but I think the notion that two men can be together in a situation or they can be touching and they might not be gay, they might just be two men—I think that that happens. I don’t think that’s a gay thing, that’s just a male thing.”

“There were legendary queer artists on Fire Island,” says Boston curator Evan Garza on the LGBT Fire Island Artist Residency that he co-founded. “People like Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar. Writers like Tennessee Williams and W.H. Auden. There’s a total absence of those people now and I think it’s so important for us to put artists back in that environment, just to see what happens to their work.”

“What, I ask you, does the stereotyping of Native people have to do with running, or even the holidays for that matter?” asks Native Appropriations blog when Cambridge Yulefest (including a 5K run) uses an illustration of happy Injuns to advertise their event. (via.)

“I’ve almost never seen people from the theatre out there [protesting] when it counted. I don’t remember seeing any actors or directors or playwrights at these events (or critics either),” says Thomas Garvey of The Hub Review. “…Today’s theatre follows, but never leads, the breaking political movements.”

“Once people attend and they realize I don’t do stripper-style, they usually come back,” says Jenn Maroney, who has been teaching “pole fitness classes” in Farmingdale, Maine, since February.

“At the end of the day, I don’t think anyone will step forward and say they bought an ‘eat more kale’ shirt thinking it was a Chick-fil-A product,” says the attorney of artist Bo Muller-Moore of Montpelier, Vermont, who is fighting claims from the Chick-fil-A fast-food chain that his “Eat More Kale” T-shirts are hurtfully similar to its slogan “Eat Mor Chikin.”

Globe: Women in nice pants and mini-skirts meet schlubs at MFA mixer: “He wasn’t as bad as the man who was walking around with jumbo-sized cotton balls sticking out of his ears. The better to tune you out, my dear? My friend Mary – the names have been changed to protect the embarrassed – saw one man and whispered: “He’s a regular. I met him last time. He has absolutely horrible breath.” The women at the mixer were dressed for the occasion.”

Providence artist Dave Cole’s “Flags of the World” installation at Norton Museum is “rich territory for discussion,” according to former MFA curator Cheryl Brutvan who put it on display at the Norton Museum in Florida.

Tension in Newport over Maya Lin design for public memorial to Doris Duke: “Despite the air of politesse, the fight has taken on the intensity of a debate over the soul of Newport itself, a city that — largely because of the efforts and example of Ms. Duke — has painstakingly preserved its colonial and Gilded Age heritage over the last four decades and has kept most incursions of contemporary commercial culture and design at bay.”

“When I read about the program online, I thought, ‘What a great thing for the girls to do,’” says Nancy Jez of South Hadley, Massachusetts, of the quilts she made with her students for American war veterans.

David Curcio of Massachusetts posts a mediation on the memento mori as part of his print collaboration with Jane Rainwater of Connecticut, who herself writes: “My work engages the viewer with its seemingly innocent decorative delight; yet upon closer examination the work challenges and questions our attraction by revealing darker truths.”

As Denver has seen “explosive growth in museums” over the past five years, The Denver Post says, “the area’s alternative art centers seem to be slipping backward, cutting curatorial positions and settling for inconsistent and often unambitious exhibition schedules.”