Man, I LOVE Robert Hughes when he’s railing against money!!! And this short documentary series about how money has come to rule the world of contemporary art is so good, I’ve posted posted all six episodes here. Not only is the message (and the historical footage) all kinds of amazing, the scenes that show Hughes staring dramatically into space are straight out of Masterpiece Theatre. There are many fantabulous moments in this doc (footage of Robert Rauschenberg crashing Robert Scull’s auction of his work is one of them), but my most favorite comes in Episode 6, in which Hughes interrogates collector Alberto Mugrabi about art. IT IS FUCKING SUBLIME (even if Hughes conveniently overlooks the fact that Rauschenberg was kind of phoning it in at the end).

Seriously, light a fattie and watch this. It is sooooo good on so many levels.

Double hat-tip to Jörg Colberg for pointing the way on this. The additional five episodes can be found below.

Would look smashing with a plastic cover: a mid-nineteenth century sofa attributed to John Henry Belter.

A sculpture by Donald Fortescue and Lawrence LaBianca in the museum’s New Materiality exhibit, up through June 12. This piece had a very subtle audio component to it: stand under the trumpet and you could hear the faint sounds of water sloshing. It was the kids there who pointed this out to us.

An incredible sculpture of a mastiff in the museum’s entryway — an earthenware piece crafted during the Eastern Han Dynasty 25-220 CE).

Accompanying the mastiff: This glazed clay sculpture of a small barking dog, produced during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE). <3

Since I seem to be on a yappy dog kick: a painting by Alex Katz, from 1971.

Yes, I’m a dogaholic. An image of a pooch snoozing, part of triptych painted by Jan Swart (von Groningen) in the mid 16th century.

Here’s the full triptych, which is titled Triptych with Moses and the Tablets of the Law and Josiah and the Book of the Law. Whew.

Saint Francis of Assissi in his tomb, by Francisco de Zurbarán, 1630/34. Pairs well with…

…Alfred Leslie’s self-portrait from 1970. Love the hammer.

This was pretty awesome: Pieter Breughel the Younger’s Peasant Brawl, painted circa 1620. Apparently, this is the sort of thing Hapsburg aristocrats used to like to hang in their chateaus.

The Gardener, 1912, by Alexei Jawkensky.

The day we visited the museum was field trip day. (There must have been half a dozen school buses parked out front.) I loved watching the kids hopscotch on top of Carl Andre’s 144 Pieces of Zinc, a sculpture from 1967.

A little girl takes in the view of a sculpture by Alexander Calder.

Here’s what she was looking at.

Laid Table, from 2007, by Beth Lipman.

Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1933, by Marsden Hartley. We saw a lot of mountains on this trip. This painting reminded me of some of our vistas.

I found this painting by Everett Shin, from circa 1910, rather striking for the way in which he masked out the woman’s face.

Ralph’s, by Robert Cottingham, from 1968.

Wally Barker, 1948, by Max Beckmann.

The museum had a pretty wild design collection. Above, a settee reconstructed from original drawings by Josef Ulrich Danhauser, circa 1815. This has Washington, D.C. written all over it.

This blew my mind: a settee from the Biedermeir period in Austria — from the 1820s. So crazy to see something so totally 1970s modern emerge from the early 19th century.

Speaking of couches: This is the sort of painting I’d expect to see over a white leather number owned by some South American narco-boss. It’s Jean-León Gerôme’s The Two Majesties, from 1883.

The second floor galleries have spectacular views of Lake Michigan — including this sculpture room that offers couches for chilling, within the Bradley Collection.

At the gift shop: Museum lip balm. Handy.

A panoramic scan of the museum’s lobby atrium. (Note that this photo is a distorted view of lobby.)

Even the garage is gaspingly beautiful — looking like a BMW showroom. I’m sure this building is a bitch to maintain (hinged metal roof mechanism next to a lake=rust galore), but it’s absolutely gorgeous to look at.

After the museum, we headed to the Old German Beer Hall for lunch. The brat and beer came to a whopping $4. Milwaukee, I love you.

All photos by C-M.

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.

Glenn Ligon, Notes on the Margin of the Black Book, 1991-1993. Courtesy the Whitney. This installation combines photographs from Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book, which consists of photographs of black male nudes, paired with commentary that the piece generated. Incorporating art criticism directly into an artwork can be overly heady, yet Ligon pulls it off. (Image courtesy of the Whitney.)

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Beckoning Bus Driver), 2001-2. Crewdson creates expertly produced and highly narrative photographs of small town life. While looking at his works, I was struck by his ability to cram so much plot into a single frame. (Image from the Whitney’s website.)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Klaus Barbie as a Family Man), 1988. When imagining Klaus Barbie, one might think of horrible imagery from the Holocaust, Hitler and torture. Gonzalez-Torres knows that urge, yet offers another view: the Butcher of Lyon as family man. It’s easy to write off villains as purely evil — this image turns Barbie into a more ambiguous figure. (Image from Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis’ website.)

Eric Fischl, Emptying of the Estuary, 1993. Fischl presents us with a concise evolution of the female nude in art history and culture. All I can say is that when the sunglasses-wearing woman’s gaze hits the side of my face, it hits it hard. (Image from the Whitney’s website.)