Alexander McQueen’s Savage Beauty and much more in my weekly Datebook.
Tag Archive for 'metropolitan museum of art'
The Met recently launched a contest called It’s Time We Met, in which the museum asked visitors to submit photos of themselves interacting with the collection. Well, my partner-in-crime El Celso has done ‘em one better. He has video. And it stars me.
Get ready for the most action-packed five minutes of your lives. Then let me know where I should go to accept my Oscar. Or, barring that, my gift bag…
xox,
C.
Detail from Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, ca. 1944, by Francis Bacon, at the Met. (Photo by C-M.)
Congrats to Vidalia for winning the C-Mon Giveaway Extravaganza, S.F. Street Art Edition!
- An artificial traffic jam.
- Relentless self-promotion: Me, me, me…blabbin’ about spring art shows on WNYC.
- Looks juicy!!! Trailer from the BBC doc The Great Contemporary Art Bubble. (@theartmarket.)
- ¡Blogga smackdown! AFC versus Christopher Knight, FLOTUS edition.
- Creatives sleep free.
- Fixing all that badly-crafted contemporary art: The New Yorker profiles art conservator Christian Scheidemann.
- Maria Lassnig’s You or Me.
- Hubba hubba: Paul Cadmus’s painting Jerry.
- I heart artsy financial schemes: The Castlestone Art Fund. “Art to me is exactly the same asset as gold bullion,” says CEO Angus Murray. Uh-huh.
- Video from the Francis Alÿs Fabiola exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Plus: Adrian Searle at the Guardian has a podcast. Art21 has more on the show here.
- Jimmy Stamp looks at SFMOMA’s new sculpture garden in a review that offers lots of photos.
- Looking Around has pics from Chicago’s new Modern Wing at the Art Institute. (See his full review here.) Plus: Hello Beautiful! compares the pedestrian bridge to some iconic rock n’ roll imagery. I, however, think it’s more water park.
- The Gardner Museum trustees approve an expansion. (Arts Journal.)
- A design round-up devoted to letters.
- “People who frequently check their e-mail have tested as less intelligent than people who are actually high on marijuana.” But what if you’re baked and checking e-mail?
- Today’s Graff: Zbick in Prague.
- A solar powered stadium in Taiwan. Looks like downright reptilian.
- “Architects are like whores.”
- Overlooking the Pacific: A super cool looking house by Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen in Montecito.
- A tour of post-punk Liverpool. (@MatthewLangley.)
- Your moment of everything is better with a bag of weed. (Mercy, Mlle. Connasse.)
Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum by Michael Gross.
This dishy page-turner chronicles more than a century’s worth of rich-people scoop and intrigue at the Met (including an entertaining account of how the venerable institution was built upon the private collection of a fake general with a warehouse full of pillaged Cypriot artifacts). I’m still reading the sucker, which checks in at 486 pages, but thus far one of my favorite quotes comes from a museum annual report that details what went down the first day the museum opened its doors to the unclean masses on Sunday in 1889:
Many visitors took the liberty of handling every object within reach; some went to the length of marring, scratching, and breaking articles unprotected by glass; a few proved to be pickpockets, and other brought with them peculiar habits, which were repulsive and unclean.
Roxy Paine’s Maelstrom. (Photo by C-M.)
Kick ass! Of the installations I’ve seen on the roof of the Met in recent summers, Roxy Paine’s post-apocalyptic naturescape has got to be the most mind-blowing: a writhing mass of stainless steel roots and branches that emerge from the drainpipes, ready to take its revenge on humanity — kinda like a Robo-Everglades. I’d seen Paine’s lovely heavy metal trees before, in an installation two years ago at Madison Square Park. But Maelstrom, which occupies the entire roof of the museum — and which requires the visitor to duck and climb around its branches — channels a Mother Earth that is ready to rip our guts out.
I couldn’t get enough of it. And apparently neither can the neighborhood wildlife: the guards told us that the installation is visited every morning by a local hawk, who was perched on one of the sculpture’s uppermost branches when we arrived. (See a photo after the jump.) Get there first thing in the morning, and you might see the bird yourself. But, what ever you do, don’t miss this exhibit.
Maelstrom is up through October 25.
Click on images to supersize. Continue reading ‘Urban jungle: Roxy Paine at the Met.’