Tagged: whitney museum

Miscellany. 03.03.13.

Madawaska, Acadian Light-Heavy, Third Arrangement, 1940 by Marsden Hartley
Madawaska, Acadian Light-Heavy, Third Arrangement, 1940 by Marsden Hartley. Part of the Whitney Museum exhibit American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe. (Photo by Sheldan C. Collins. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum.)

***Please please please vote for my Richard Jackson story over at KCET so that it gets made into a video segment and I don’t suffer INTERNET SHAME on par with Denver the Dog. Voting ends ended on Monday evening morning. Never mind! I lost…  (Though you should totally watch the Denver the Dog video, which came to me courtesy of John Powers.)

  • When the Hitler art isn’t ironic: A staggering must-read from Jen Graves.
  • With a very thoughtful follow-up by Jillian Steinhauer.
  • Highest median student debt comes from…art schools.
  • Mid-size galleries being squeezed out of Chelsea spaces by rising rents. Which means Chelsea is about to become waaaaaaaay more boring.
  • So glad to hear that MoMA has acquired one of Senga Nengudi’s pantyhose pieces. ♥♥♥
  • A Tumblr art symposium.
  • To respond — or not — to bad reviews.
  • Kriston Capps has an interesting write-up on the Corcoran Gallery’s Pump Me Up show, which examines D.C. subcultures of the 1980s.
  • The complicated provenance of street art: a London town wants its Banksy back. More here. (Hyperallergic.)
  • A wonderful video from Art21 about Margaret Kilgallen’s heroines. WELL DONE.
  • A Kiowa Warrior’s sketchbook from 1877.
  • Trouble at El Museo. This bums me out.
  • If you’ve got some extra cash on you, Bob Hope’s John-Lautner-designed Palm Springs pad is for sale. It looks like a space ship and comes with a golf hole and impossibly green lawns. (@HawthorneLAT.)
  • The history of Pad Thai.
  • The artist as a chocolate bust.
  • At an alternative L.A. space: The art of food. So conceptual…
  • And speaking of conceptual: an excellent takedown of the form. Thank you, Portlandia.

*** PLUS: Congrats to Maggie and Chris for winning the Tony Smith T-shirts! And thanks to INCCA-North America for supplying them.

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Calendar. 02.27.13.

The Rose, 1958–66, by Jay Defeo, at the Whitney Museum of American Art
The Rose, 1958–66, by Jay Defeo. Part of the artist’s solo exhibit Jay Defeo: A Retrospective, at the Whitney Museum of America Art. Opens Thursday. (Photo by Ben Blackwell. © 2012 The Jay DeFeo Trust / Artists Rights Society)

  • NYC: Impressionism, Fashion & Modernity, at the Metropolitan Museum. Through May 27, on the Upper East Side.
  • NYC: At War With the Obvious: Photographs by William Eggleston, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through July 28.
  • NYC: Wolfgang Laib, Without Beginning and Without End, at Sperone Westwater. Opens Friday, on the Lower East Side.
  • NYC: Paul D’Agostino, Twilit Ensembles, at Pocket Utopia. Opens Sunday, on the Lower East Side.
  • NYC: Critical Art Ensemble, Disturbances, a book launch and talk with Brian Holmes, Natalie Jeremijenko, Trevor Paglen and Steve Kurtz, at Artists Space. Thursday at 7pm, in Tribeca.
  • Jersey City: The Space Between, at the Middle East Center for the Arts: Contemporary Perspective on Tradition and Society. Opens Sunday.
  • Charlotte, N.C.: Return to the Sea: Saltworks by Motoi Yamamoto, at the Mint Museum. Opens Sunday, at the uptown location.
  • L.A.: Olga Koumoundouros, Possessed by Glint and Dreams, at Susanne Vielmetter Projects. Opens Friday, in Culver City.
  • L.A.: Untold Stories: Collecting and Transforming Medieval Manuscripts, at the Getty Museum. Through May 12, in West L.A.
  • L.A.: Xerox: Barbara T. Smith 1965-1966, at The Box. Through March 23, in downtown.
  • Hamburg: Brad Downey, The Floor, The Table and the Wall, at Kulturzentrum Marstallam Schloss Ahrensburg. Opens Sunday at 11am.
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The Figure in Contemporary Art: Whitney Museum edition.

Glenn Ligon, Self-Portrait, 1996. This screen print definitely has to be seen in person to be appreciated. It’s heavily pixelated and provides a similar experience to viewing Chuck Close’s work. At a distance, the image looks perfect, yet as you get closer the process and its flaws become more apparent. (Courtesy the Whitney Museum).

A recent visit to the Whitney Museum of American Art earlier this month for the opening of the Glenn Ligon show turned up a large selection of works for my series on the Figure in Contemporary Art (check out parts One, Two, and Three). While I was there, I also saw Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection, housed in the Emily Fisher Landau galleries. While trying to soak in the art, I kept finding myself listening to old rich patrons talk about pieces they would buy. Thankfully, amid the market talk, I did manage to find exactly what this series needed: quality art examining the figure in many different manners, from many different voices. As I wrapped up my viewing experience at the museum, the upper-crust were downstairs trying to get down to Justin Timberlake’s Sexy Back. I knew then that it was time to get back to Brooklyn.

Continue reading →

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Nostalgia for the Net.

Last night, I attended a highly interesting panel at Hyperallergic HQ in Brooklyn called “Nostalgia for the Net” — in which an interesting crew of folks (including Joanne McNeil, of the always awesome Tomorrow Museum) reminisced about the early days of the internet, when connecting to one another digitally involved acronyms such as Telnet and BBS. At one point, the discussion drifted to Steve Lambert’s recent discovery of the movie Space Jam‘s website — in its pristine 1996 state. And it reminded me that, recently, while doing research for an upcoming story in ARTnews, I came across the Whitney Museum’s website for a 2001 digital art exhibit called Bitstreams. It has retained its early millennium layout — complete with reference to Netscape. Old school!

Find the site here. Or by clicking the image above.

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And now, for a little holiday show…

If you are looking for a fine way to walk off all that turkey (or tofurkey), may I highly recommend the Charles LeDray exhibit at the Whitney. It is intense. It’s hilarious. It makes you think about why we fetishize the things we do. Best of all: I’ve got a slide show of it up at Gallerina.

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Photo: Jenny Holzer at the Whitney.


Mother and child absorb Holzer’s floor installation, For Chicago. (Photo by El Celso.)

  • La Smith’s glowing review.
  • NYT photo essay.
  • WNYC photo essay. Plus: Lots o’ video.
  • Bloomberg’s critique.
  • Paddy Johnson interviews Holzer.
Jenny Holzer’s PROTECT PROTECT is up through May 31.
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