Figure with Heart, by Keith Haring, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. (Photo by stickb0y7.)
For the artful Thanksgiving types, here’s a shot of the 48-foot tall Keith Haring balloon at today’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in NYC. Next year, I’d really like to see a floating urinal by Marcel Duchamp. Because who wouldn’t give thanks at the sight of that…especially if you’ve been standing around in the street all day, waiting for a bunch of balloons to roll by. (Thanks to Hol Art Books for the heads up.)
In the meantime, may your potatoes be fluffy and your pumpkin pie, sweet. Happy Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is upon us, which means I’ll be spending the next four days eatin’ bird. It also means I’ll be taking the rest of the week off. Have a happy holiday!
Last Friday was the last, exhausting day of the USC Annenberg Getty Fellowship. Thankfully, the three weeks of Chicken Little driving around L.A. were capped with an absolutely sublime happening: we got to watch the sun set inside a James Turrell sculpture at the home of a pair of prominent L.A. art collectors. The piece is super simple: a giant white cube, where you can sit and gape at the sky through an opening overhead (reminiscent of his piece at P.S. 1 in NYC). The square cut out of the ceiling makes for a nice frame. The lights within the sculpture highlight the intensity of changing blues. Naturally, I snapped the whole process. I’m not quite sure that I was able to fully capture the subtle variations of the sky as the sun set, but I wasn’t gonna leave without giving it a try.
Click on images to supersize. Many more after the jump.
In the last 24 hours, for reasons unbeknownst to me, all comments have disappeared from C-Mon, as well as the ability to post them. This means that I accidentally hit a key I shouldn’t have or WordPress sucks harder than I thought it did. My guess is that it’s the latter.
Please be patient while I try to figure this one out.
NPR reports on the history of museums. Interesting fact: museums in the U.S. draw 850 million visitors annually.
Would you like fries with that? 2,400 art and museum types have signed a petition against the appointment of Mario Resca, a former McDonald’s exec, to the new position of “super manager” of Italy’s museums.
MOCA-PALOOZA: Eli Broad offers a $30 million challenge grant to save L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Okay, rich people, time to open your wallets. (Which isn’t going to solve the museum’s main problem: Its board of directors, which has clearly been asleep at the wheel.) Analysis here and here. Plus: 450 people turned out to support the museum at a Sunday rally organized via Facebook. And: Jeremy Strick’s e-letter to museum supporters.
São Paulo Biennial at risk, for all kinds of problems, including good old-fashioned Latin American-style corruption. My favorite kind!
Jerry Saltz on Cindy Sherman: “…like a porn star, Sherman is obviously doing what she’s doing in all her pictures—but you never know if she’s faking it.”
In the conference room at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with ceiling wallpaper by John Baldessari. (Photo by C-M.)
Hey Folks:
Due to the crazy schedule on this fellowship (today is the last day), the Digest is a bust. In lieu of something informative, please enjoy the view of John Baldessari’s ceiling installation inside LACMA’s boardroom. It’s what I was looking at while museum director Michael Govan was coyly leaving the door open to a merger with MOCA.
Visual Molasses: A figure comes into focus very, very sloooowly in a Kevin Hanleyvideo piece at MoCA. Hang around long enough and you’ll wonder if you’re seeing things. (Photos by C-M.)
Just because one L.A. museum is in the middle of a financial freefalldoesn’t mean that there isn’t buzz-inducing art to be seen. At MoCA, in a corner of the Conceptualism in California show at the Geffen Contemporary there is a meltingly slow piece by Kevin Hanley, as well as a black-and-white, super-fast Bruce Conner number that has a total 2 a.m. music video kind of feel. Better yet: it’s comprised of three monitors. I coulda hung out there all afternoon.
Across town, at LACMA, there’s Chris Burden’s Urban Light installation. I know that this piece is far from new (it debuted in February), but I managed to spend a bit of time hanging out with this sculpture at dusk today and it was damn beautiful. The best part: anybody can wander around this thing, 24 hours a day. Perfect for a late-night hangout, especially if you’ve got a Slurpee in hand.
Eve Ray Forever, 1965-2006 by Bruce Conner. Quick cuts. Lots of nudity. Yeah.
Chris Burden’s Urban Light. Lampposts all in rows. Duuuude.
Late addition:
How could I forget? Marcel Duchamp’s Roto Relief: Optical Discs, at the Norton Simon. You are getting sleepy… On view through Dec. 8.
The devil in Jim Dine’s ear: Yours truly, at the Getty Villa, taking in the giganto sculpture of the artist’s head.
L.A. MOCA is in baaad fiscal shape, reports the L.A. Times. “Federal tax returns show that even before the current national crisis, MOCA had been draining its reserves to pay operating expenses. In the meantime, the museum’s staff has grown.”
