Art
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Art 10 Sculptures We'd Like To See in the Met's Revamped Plaza
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 12:12 PM
On Tuesday the Metropolitan Museum announced that it will be undertaking the first major renovation of its Fifth Avenue plaza between 80th and 84th streets in over four decades, which could begin as early as this fall, and is scheduled to be completed by the summer of 2014. The new plaza, designed by Philadelphia-based architects Olin—whose past public plaza designs include little things you might've heard of like Bryant Park and the Washington Monument—will feature smaller fountains, much more seating, and new trees but, weirdly, no new space for outdoor sculpture installations. Which is a shame, because there are at least 10 sculptures from the museum's collection I can think of that would make great additions to the Met's new plaza.
Art Spikey Air-Cleaning Star Landing in MoMA PS1 Courtyard This Summer
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 8:58 AM
Though it's currently home to the Performance Dome—where a new performance series just launched—come June the MoMA PS1 courtyard will host a watery blue explosion titled "Wendy" as the latest entry in its Young Architects Program. The winning architecture firm, Flatiron-based HWKN, follows successive Brooklyn-based winners Interboro Partners and SO-IL. Their design will help clean the air in car-clogged Long Island City.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Art / News Tumblr Fuck Your Noguchi Coffee Table Hates Your Taste in Interior Decoration
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 4:04 PM
Like Unhappy Hipsters before it, the ten-day-old Tumblr Fuck Your Noguchi Coffee Table thinks you're trying way too hard with your interior decoration choices, which it finds pitifully cliché and artless. It all started with "Fuck your Noguchi coffee table"—in reference to a living room's conspicuous display of a small table designed by the late Japanese-American Modern sculptor—and has only gotten more exasperated and annoyed since. Most recently: Fuck your card catalog, your thing that says EAT in your kitchen, and your cardboard taxidermy.
Follow Benjamin Sutton on Twitter @LMagArt
Art Art Thief Mark Lugo Pleads Guilty to Art Theft in New York
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 3:20 PM
While we await its big screen (or HBO) adaptation, we've been following the saga of coast-to-coast art thief and former Manhattan sommelier Mark Lugo, who was first caught for swiping a Picasso drawing from a San Francisco gallery last July and was subsequently discovered to be keeping a world-class collection of stolen artworks in his Hoboken apartment. Though he initially pleaded not guilty to several charges in a Manhattan court in December, he's come around and yesterday pleaded guilty to stealing a Fernand Léger from a gallery at the Carlyle Hotel last June.
Art / Music When Music Meets the Art World: 6 Multidisciplinary Works
Posted by Tobias Carroll on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 12:03 PM
On Sunday, avant-dance musician Nicolas Jaar performed a five-hour-long afternoon of music and visual art in the museum’s “Performance Dome.” Aided by numerous collaborators, the piece combined recording, sampling, and looping techniques with analogue instrumentation and sound-derived video. Given that Jaar’s more pop-oriented music still hovers around the fringes of the abstract, it’s not surprising to see him making a move in the direction of the art world. What follows are six others musicians or bands who have also, either through multidisciplinary work or collaboration, found themselves occupying a similar space.
Art / News Solving Crown Heights' Crime Problem with Public Art Made of Zip Ties
Posted by Lisa Gomez on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 10:32 AM
"During our weekly meeting we were finding ourselves mentally distracted by the shootings that had taken place a couple days earlier and no matter what we talked about while brainstorming, the shootings just kept coming back up. There was a lot of community discussion about the shootings at the time...so we just decided to focus our project on that. We wanted to do something that will help the neighborhood get past the controversy and focusing on solutions," says Zellner.
And so, Art Not Arrests was born.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Art / News People in BRIC Houses: Construction of Fulton Avenue Cultural Center Progresses
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 2:14 PM
It wasn't even four months ago that borough president Marty Markowitz, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, local politicians and folks from BRIC Arts | Media | Bklyn and Urban Glass donned hardhats to break ground on the new BRIC House at Fulton Avenue and Rockwell Place, but oh how things have changed at the historic Strand Theater. BRIC just posted photos from inside the theater, which by 2013 will reopen as a gallery-performance space-glass-blowing studio and offices for Urban Glass and BRIC.
Art South Slope Tree Sweaters Stolen!
Posted by Henry Stewart on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 1:27 PM
Russell wrapped her first tree between Sixth and Seventh avenues four years ago, and has since added new sweaters every year. She hopes the sweaters inspire pedestrians to "rethink their environment,” the Paper reports. She was inspired by The Gates, Patch reports.
Art Thor Destroys, Clumsily Reassembles Coney Island Street Art Murals
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 9:48 AM
In spring of last year pop-up exhibition experts No Longer Empty tapped a group of Brooklyn-based street artists to adorn the ugly blue fencing surrounding a vacant Thor Equities lot at Stillwell and Surf avenues with a Coney-themed collaborative mural. The resulting festive street art composition brightened the blighted corner, until last week the fencing came down to reveal the ugly building behind, and the adorned fence reappeared at a different Thor construction site, very poorly reassembled.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Art / News The Next High Line: The Tappan Zee Bridge?
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 3:00 PM
Ever since the High Line opened and began to attract flocks of tourists and unquantifiable millions of dollars to the adjacent West Chelsea streets, other neighborhoods and cities have been trying to replicate the formula. We even tried to imagine a new High Line-style retrofit park for each of the outer boroughs. But the parkland potential of one about-to-be-decommissioned piece of infrastructure hadn't occurred to us: the Tappan Zee Bridge. Now a movement is afoot to convert Tarrytown's Hudson-spanning bridge into a pedestrian crossing and park.
Art Royal Flush: At $250 Million, Cézanne's "Card Players" Becomes Most Expensive Artwork Ever Sold
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 2:10 PM
Back in 2010 we thought that the $106.5 million dropped at auction on Pablo Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" (1932) was impressive, but we see now that those were small potatoes. Yesterday news broke that the royal family of Qatar paid a mind-boggling $250 million for Paul Cézanne's "The Card Players" (1892-93, detail above), making it the most expensive artwork ever sold.
Art Inside the Artist's Construction Site: Dustin Yellin's Huge Art Center in Red Hook
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 11:08 AM
"We've been working on it since June," says Red Hook-based artist Dustin Yellin as he stands in the main exhibition space of a new art center in a Civil War-era warehouse on Pioneer Street. "And the key has just been to get the building operational so that artists can move in, and as soon as it warms up we can really start to work outside." Walking through this block-long, three-story-high space, the startling size and character of the building is astounding. "I walk in here and I feel that way," Yellin says. "Every day I walk in here and I go, 'Where am I? This is bananas.' Every day."
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Art / Books Brooklyn Artists Building Brownstone-Shaped Lending Library in Cobble Hill Park
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 3:03 PM
Brooklyn-based artist Leon Reid IV—he of "Tourist-in-Chief" and proposed public sculptures of a giant squirrel in a park and a giant spider in the Brooklyn Bridge's suspension cables—has teamed up with Brooklyn-based documentary producer Julia Marchesi (The City Dark) to create the "100 Story House," a five-and-a-half feet tall miniature brownstone that they plan to build, install in Cobble Hill Park and fill with books to be borrowed and exchanged by anyone and everyone. The pair just launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the project. I asked Reid about the projects' origins, and its more practical concerns, like where the books will come from and what the Department of Parks—which Reid has had problems with in the past—thinks of it.
Art Remembering Mike Kelley with His 10 Funniest Artworks
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 9:47 AM
Yesterday the seminal contemporary American artist Mike Kelley, who was born in Detroit in 1954 and had been based in Los Angeles for many years, was found dead at his home there from an apparent suicide—especially worthwhile obituaries are in the L.A. Times, New York Times, Guardian and on Glenn O'Brien's blog. Working in an incredibly broad range of media from drawings and paintings to video, installation and sculptures made from eviscerated stuffed animals, Kelley rose to prominence in the 1990s. He had recently been selected to participate in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, which will be his eighth. Throughout his many different uses of media and collaborations, perhaps the greatest constant in Kelley's practice was a sharp sense of humor that often incorporated pop culture references and abject imagery. Accordingly, this selection of his funniest work is not for the squeamish.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Art / Film Museums Scrambling to Buy a "Clock"
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 2:08 PM
In September of last year MoMA scooped up one of six editions of Christian Marclay's epic video collage "The Clock," which, when it made its New York premiere a year ago at Paula Cooper Gallery, caused long lines to form all along 21st Street even during marathon overnight screenings. Its appeal for museums is obvious, and after LACMA bought the second edition and the Boston MFA and the National Gallery of Canada split the bill for another, three museums have pooled their resources to acquire the fourth edition of the video. Now they'll just need to figure out who gets it on weekends and holidays.
Art Another Williamsburg Gallery Moves East; Camel Art Space Bushwick-Bound
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 9:45 AM
The Williamsburg-to-Bushwick gallery migration continues (ahem, just as I predicted) with news that longtime Metropolitan Avenue non-profit gallery and studio complex Camel Art Space will be moving east and losing its charmingly oddball name—and the found camel mascot that provided it. The gallery's new, as yet unnamed incarnation, will open in April.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Art New Museum Director Massimiliano Gioni Named Director of 2013 Venice Biennale
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 1:45 PM
- Massimiliano Gioni runs Venice. (via ArtObserved)
The art bloggosphere is atwitter today with news that New Museum associate director and director of exhibitions Massimiliano Gioni—curator of, amongst others, the NuMu's just-closed Carsten Höller exhibition, its best-attended ever, and the critically acclaimed Ostalgia—has been named the director of the 2013 Venice Biennale. Gioni, a popular curator on the international biennial circuit, previously directed the eighth Gwangju Art Biennale in Korea in 2010, served as artistic director of the fourth Berlin Biennale in 2006 and was a co-curator of Manifesta two years earlier.
Art / Music Concert Photographers Take Center Stage at Bushwick's Fort Useless
Posted by Eugene Reznik on Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 12:08 PM
- 120 dB installation view. (Courtesy eljezel/Flickr)
Anyone who’s scrolled through concert photos online knows it becomes extremely difficult to distinguish between them unless they’re of a spectacular, overproduced or hammy performance. Often angles and lights are awkward; image quality and composition are not always the foremost concerns. How would they look in a gallery? Well, Fort Useless, the small front room of an inconspicuous row house in Bushwick—one of the neighborhood's better-named, lesser-known DIY spaces—just opened a group exhibition of New York music photography by 13 female photographers who shoot for Brooklyn Vegan, Stereogum, NPR and the like.
Art Beyond Performance Dome: MoMA PS1's New Geodesic Pavilion
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 9:45 AM
We're all familiar (right?) with MoMA PS1's summertime architectural interventions into its cement-and-gravel courtyard, but this winter the Long Island City contemporary art museum is trying something new. On Sunday February 5 it will inaugurate the Performance Dome, a geodesic structure erected in its courtyard that, through May 13, will host performance art deathmatches special programs every Sunday.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Art Tumblr T-Rex Trying Illustrates Tough Chores for Stubby-Armed Giant
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 4:00 PM
Life is hard for the Tyrannosaurus rex: not only are all its buddies extinct, but every visit to Jurassic Park ends in tragedy. And then there are all the little things, like trying to make balloon animals, trying to put on a cardigan, trying to floss, trying to shuffle a deck of cards, which are all impossible due to T-Rex's tiny arms, and hilariously illustrated by Hugh Murphy on his Tumblr T-Rex Trying. It all started one week ago with T-Rex trying to paint his house (above) which was the first such joke exchanged between Murphy and his brothers that he decided to draw. You'll recall that I more or less predicted this earlier this month, when I projected that 2012 would be an exceptionally good year for dinosaur art. (TDW)
Follow Benjamin Sutton on Twitter @LMagArt
