New England Journal of Aesthetic Research news headlines

Would West Hartford resident David Murphy’s design for a catamaran built from recycled oil drums help third-world fishermen?

NBC is trying to develop a television show based on “Midnight, Mass,” a comic book series about a pair of paranormal investigators based out of (the fictional) Midnight, Massachusetts,

Why is “Gangnam Style” so ridiculously, infectiously awesome? Because South Korean sensation Psy attended Boston University and Berklee College of Music. Check out his student ID.

Bankrupt, laid-off Maine banker Eric Leppanen makes duh American flag painting from the pile of credit cards with which he ran up his debt.

“This is the only museum anywhere in the world dedicated to Irish art on the Great Hunger,” says John Lahey, president of Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, which plans to open Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum on Oct. 11. “There is nothing like this in Ireland. The educational piece is that this was an avoidable tragedy.”

How does the Rhode Island Foundation foster ideas to spark L’il Rhody’s economy? It brings together 300 Ocean State residents for a brainstorming session … and then hires a Tennessee firm to document it. What’s wrong with this picture?

Medical marijuana ballot question in Massachusetts sparks website parodying opposition: “Medicinal Marijuana is the Gateway Drug Twinkie Addiction.”

A retrospective of the conceptual photography of Carrie Mae Weems, who made her breakthrough work while teaching at Hampshire College in Massachusetts in the 1980s, is coming to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. It’s another example of how Massachusetts has been a leader in photography over the past century–but that the story is rarely told here. The Weems retrospective will travel, but not make any stops in New England.

“I see the screenprints as being the most essential in the sense that they’re the furthest refinements of his images,” says curator Martin Krause of a retrospective of the prints of Maine artist Robert Indiana that he’s organizing for the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2013. “If Robert Indiana was interested in a rather luminous anonymous surface for his paintings then, well, nothing gets more anonymous and glossier than screenprinting ink. So in many ways, one could think of the prints as being hand-me-down images — but on the other hand they really are probably the closest to Robert Indiana’s ideal as you can get.”

Rhode Island College’s new art center will be named Alex and Ani Hall in thanks for a $1 million donation from the jewelry company Alex and Ani, the Providence school reports.

Arts and cultural organizations contribute $115 million and the equivalent of nearly 3,500 jobs to the New Hampshire economy, according to a new study by Americans for the Arts.

“Living in Scituate, his art took on a new immediacy,” said Lucille Sorrentino of her late husband, Michael Sorrentino, whose watercolors are featured in a retrospective at the Guild of Boston Artists. “Those early paintings were truly inspired by the gorgeous New England landscape and beautiful sights of nature, which literally surrounded us at our doorstep.”

Art made by children at America’s Camp, a summer camp in Massachusetts for kids who lost family members in the 9/11 attacks, is being exhibited at the Pentagon.

MassArt is debuting new $61 million, 21-story dorm for first- and second-year students on Huntington Avenue in Boston. It was designed by the Boston firm ADD.

Auction planned for still-lifes and a landscape painting by C.E. Porter (1847-1923), “one of the country’s foremost African-American painters,” that were found in a Connecticut home. He lived in Hartford and Vernon nearly all his life, except for during his studies in Paris — Mark Twain wrote him a letter of recommendation.

“A lot of comic book fans grow up … but never grow out of the love of the medium,” says Bob Almond of New Bedford, Massachusetts, whose drawings have appeared in comics featuring The Black Panther, Warlock, Avengers, Aquaman, Supergirl, Blade, Spiderman and Vampirela.

Construction of new theater for the Winnipesaukee Playhouse in Meredith, New Hampshire, boosted by $25,000 donation from Laconia Harley-Davidson that will be matched dollar-for-dollar by a local benefactor, resulting in a $50,000 contribution.

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Is Massachusetts-native Tony Millionaire ending his long-running comic “Maakies”?

Should stripping be considered an art? And receive tax exemptions like other art?

Dear friends at Bread and Puppet: If wind power is so bad for wildlife that you’re against it, what about buildings? Or pet cats? Estimates vary, but it’s thought that wind turbines kill 400,000+ birds each year. But buildings kill 976 million. Cats? They kill hundreds of millions of birds annually.

Check out the best cat video on the Internet, at least according to a genius project organized by Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center. Let it be a model to curators everywhere!

Hooksett Heritage Commission wins $6,300 grant to restore murals depicting Native Americans fishing that decorated the New Hampshire town’s McDonald’s in the 1970s.

After more than a century, fascade of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art remains unfinished: “Few … notice the crude, unfinished blocks on the otherwise elegant Beaux Arts facade.”

Washington Post: “Many, if not most, of the major art schools in the country are not affiliated with museums — Baltimore’s Maryland Institute, California Institute of Art and Rhode Island School of Design to name three.” Perhaps you’ve not heard of the RISD Museum?