Category: art

MoMA renovation

MoMA is in the midst of a fairly major renovation project. The last couple of times I went, things were pretty confusing. A lot of stuff was under construction. Here’s an article from the NY Times, from June, with some detail. I know that the entire project won’t be done until 2019, but I’m hoping that, the next time I go, things will be a little more stable.

I have a few complaints about the current status of the museum, but they’re mostly minor complaints about services and not about art. For instance, I think there’s still supposed to be a members coat check, but I have no idea where it is. And I don’t like the way they’re running the cafe now. It used to be run like a regular sit-down restaurant, but now (at least as of the last time I went), they’re running it like a hybrid cafeteria/restaurant. You order and pay for your food first, at a counter, then sit down, and they bring it to you. Not a big deal, but it makes it just a little less relaxing, and a little harder to deal with, if you decide you want an espresso and tiramisu after you’re finished with your meal. (Yeah, I know, first world problems.)

I do like the fact that the extra space will help them show more art from minority and female artists. At the same time, I hope they don’t relegate some of my favorite “white guy” art to the basement or something. I know that Starry Night isn’t going anywhere, but I am a little worried about OOF. (Yeah, I know it’s weird, but I like looking at it. In fact, I’m using it for the wallpaper on my Mac right now.)

A busy day in New York

I took a trip into New York City today to see a few things. First, an overdue trip to the Met to check out Seurat’s Circus Sideshow. As a young computer nerd, I was always fascinated by Seurat, as his method seemed particularly relevant and even prescient: putting images together pixel by pixel. The exhibit isn’t a general Seurat exhibit, rather it’s an exhibit of one particular painting, and a bunch of related material, some by Seurat and some by other artists. The Times has a good overview article on the exhibit.

I then walked up to the Guggenheim. I wanted to see Jackson Pollock’s Alchemy, and the little exhibit they have related to its restoration. The painting itself is at the very top of their main rotunda. The exhibit about the restoration is hidden away in the basement, and a bit hard to find. But it’s worth seeing, if you’re a Pollock nerd like me. The main exhibit in the rotunda is called Creating a Modern Guggenheim, and is kind of a catch-all exhibit of miscellaneous works from the Guggenheim’s collection. Aside from the Pollock, there’s a bunch of other interesting stuff, though there’s no real theme, other than “look at all this stuff we’ve got.”

Finally, I went to MoCCA Fest. I’d thought about going to MoCCA Fest before, but never quite managed it. I wasn’t really even aware of it this year, until I saw a mention of it yesterday, so I figured I’d stop by. MoCCA Fest is basically a comic con, but without all the low-brow superhero stuff. (I don’t say that judgmentally. I love the low-brow superhero stuff.) So it’s all indie comics and weird artsy stuff. They had a nice little exhibit of Drew Friedman’s art from his Heroes of the Comics books, and Friedman himself was there. I really love his work on those books, but I can never talk myself into buying them. Cliff Chiang was at the CBLDF booth while I was there. The Wonder Woman books he was signing were probably the most mainstream thing at the show. I’m honestly not that familiar with his work, but it does look interesting now that I’m poking around on the internet learning a bit about him. There were a couple of other guests I would have liked to have seen, David Lloyd and Gene Luen Yang, but neither one was around while I was there. I feel a little guilty that I left the show without having bought any books, but I didn’t see anything that I really wanted. I feel like I should be reading and supporting more indie comics, but there hasn’t really been much of interest to me lately outside the mainstream. Anyway, it was a fun little show, so maybe I’ll go back next year.

Overall, a good day, with decent spring-like weather and a fair bit of walking. Now I’m tired and need a nap.

Art and Literature for Troubled Times

OK, that post title might be a little pretentious. But I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff on the internet over the last month about art and literature, with relation to “our current political/cultural situation,” and enough of it is interesting to me that I thought I’d toss together a post.

I’ve previously mentioned Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.” And of course 1984 has gotten a lot of attention. (And, speaking of Orwell, a school in Connecticut has removed Animal Farm from their curriculum, right when we need it the most.)

WNYC this week has been asking people to post about their current reading & watching habits on Twitter, using the hashtag #CulturePack. That’s gotten some interesting responses, in the areas of relevant non-fiction, relevant fiction, and pure escapism. (One popular answer is Harry Potter books and movies, which I think falls into both the relevant and escapism categories, if you think about it.)

The New Yorker just published an article called The Books We’re Turning to Now, which I haven’t read yet, but should be interesting.

Going a little further down the road of dystopian fiction, William Gibson’s The Peripheral has been mentioned a lot lately. Gibson himself has compared the current administration to the concept of the klept from his book. The Peripheral is actually the only Gibson novel I haven’t read yet. (I should fix that soon.)

And to work a little black humor into all of this, here’s a comic strip about how 2017 is looking a lot like a 1990’s cyberpunk dystopia. Speaking as someone who read a fair amount of cyberpunk in the 90s, this is pretty accurate.

Meanwhile, on the art front, MoMA is hanging some works by Muslim artists to protest Trump’s entry ban. This seems like a pretty minor thing to do, but it’s important, in a way, and it’s appropriate, for a museum. MoMA’s exhibit Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter is relevant too, but just closed. Maybe they should have kept that going for a few more months.

As for me, I’ve been reading The New York Times and The New Yorker a lot lately. Though I’m not just reading the “current events” stuff: I’ve also been reading long-form stuff, digging into older articles on art, literature, and what-not. (And, yeah, I know that makes me sound like a typical East Coast liberal. Guilty as charged, I guess.)

For escapism, I’m still reading a lot of the DC Rebirth comics. I keep trying to talk myself into dropping one or more of the ones I’m buying regularly, but I haven’t managed to do that yet. They’re all still pretty good and worth reading.

Mastry and Monster Men

I took my own advice (from yesterday) and took the train into New York today and visited The Met Breuer. The Kerry James Marshall exhibit was really impressive. I knew next to nothing about him, going in, and honestly my expectations were kind of low. But the exhibit is great. I have a lot of respect for him now, especially since I found out that he’s a fellow comic book collector! And the exhibit includes a bit of comic-strip work from something he calls “Rythm Mastr.” I’m a little unclear as to whether or not Rythm Mastr is a completed work, and/or if it’s ever actually appeared as a printed comic book. I found a couple of articles that mention it here and here, but I’m still not sure.

Speaking of comics: on the train, I read through the recent Night of the Monster Men crossover that ran through six issues of Batman, Detective, and Nightwing. I’m not usually a big fan of multi-title crossovers, but this was a pretty good one. I’ve really been enjoying the current Rebirth iterations of Batman and Detective. I had really only planned to pick up a few of the DC Rebirth titles through to the end of the summer, then I was going to drop them, but all of the ones I’m reading are good enough that I want to keep reading them. So now I’m thinking that I’ll reassess everything at the end of the year. But, for now, I’m still buying 5 or 6 DC titles regularly.

Waiting for the Miracle

Well, it’s Saturday morning, and I’m really hoping next week is better than this week. I’m listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Waiting for the Miracle” right now. This live version is pretty good. I never got the chance to see him live, and now I really regret that. Hearing of his passing right after the election news was a bit of a one-two punch.

I’d been listening to The Essential Leonard Cohen a lot recently, so he’s been on my mind. I got on a Cohen kick a couple of months ago, after reading a book called A Cold and Broken Hallelujah, by Tyler Dilts. It’s not a book about Cohen, rather a police procedural that references Cohen (and Springsteen, and some other interesting music and books).

I didn’t really intend on writing another blog post touching on the election, but I’ve got a lot of stuff swirling around in my head, so maybe letting some of it out might help.

I was going to link to one or two articles on Quartz, but there are so many random post-election articles on there that picking out one or two seems pointless. Oh, heck, I can’t resist the temptation: here’s their two most popular articles right now (from the “popular” link at the top of the home page):

  1. A playlist of Leonard Cohen’s songs to help you make sense of the world
  2. Want to understand how Trump happened? Study quantum physics

The first one is just a list of YouTube videos (including some pretty good ones). I’m not even going to try reading that second one. From the headline, it seems like it would be fairly similar to a whole host of media stories about how we can “understand” the election through the lens of one particular viewpoint or another (math, physics, history, art, etc.). At this point, I think I’ve decided to opt out of reading any more of those.

Here’s another bit of media overload I hit this morning: Yesterday, I saw an article somewhere about a hiker running into Bill and Hillary Clinton while out for a walk. The hiker got a selfie with Hillary. Minor, innocuous, story, right? The kind of thing that wouldn’t even be a story, if we still got our news printed on dead trees and delivered daily. But on the web, it’s worth writing up and posting, because it’ll attract a few clicks, so why not? Well, this morning, in the infamous “trending topics” sidebar on Facebook, I see a link to an article with this title: “Was the Hillary hiking in the woods photo staged?” (I’m not linking to this article, for obvious reasons.) First: a generally good rule of thumb for any article whose headline is phrased as a question is that the answer to that question is always “no.” If it was “yes,” the headline would have been a statement instead of a question. (This is apparently Betteridge’s law of headlines.) Second: who cares? Hillary has already lost the election. Why would she be “staging” photos? Why would anyone care if she did? I think this article is basically the result of a process that got started at the beginning of this election cycle and is now stuck on auto-pilot, and nobody knows how to turn it off. The day after Hillary passes away, years from now (hopefully not any time soon), there will be an article titled “Did Hillary fake her own death?” (The answer will, of course, be NO.)

My main takeaway from the paragraph above is that I should really spend less time on Facebook. One of my Facebook friends recently linked to F. B. Purity, which is a Firefox add-in that cleans up Facebook a bit, allowing you to hide some of the more annoying bits, like that “trending topics” section. I went ahead and installed it this morning, so we’ll see if that helps. Of course, it’s only useful on Mac and Windows, and not on iOS. I’ve fallen into the habit of checking Facebook on my phone a lot at work, and I should really stop doing that. Sometimes, it’s a nice little break, if I hop on there and see something funny, or a nice photo of a friend’s kids. But generally it’s just a time sink, and I shouldn’t be bothering with it at work.

I think I might want to revisit the Bored and Brilliant series of episodes from the Note to Self podcast. When it first aired, I thought there were a few really interesting observations and ideas in there, along with a bunch of stuff that seemed either really obvious to me, or that didn’t really apply to me. Right now, though, rethinking how I use my phone and how I consume news and social media seems like a really good idea.

Working my way back around to something that actually relates a little more directly to the election results, rather than how the media is reacting to the results, and how I’m reacting to that, here’s a link to a blog post by Marco Arment on the election results.

Most people in the world are good, and want to be good to each other. Whether they vote that way or not, far more Americans believe in progressive, liberal, inclusive views than regressive, aggressive, conservative ones.

He relates this election to his feelings during the George W. Bush years. I’m apparently a good bit older than him, so I’ve been thinking back to the Reagan years, which correspond almost exactly to my teenage years. So thinking about the next four years as “probably not much worse than Reagan or Bush” is… a little comforting?

I remember a lot of Reagan-related black humor from my nerd friends in high school. I suspect there will be a lot of black humor over the next few years. I just recently finished reading a book of Hunter S. Thompson essays from the Reagan years. I think we really need a find a new Thompson for the Trump years. Maybe Matt Taibbi? Not quite, but he’s usually worth reading. Of course, he rejects the comforting idea of comparing Trump to Reagan or Bush:

Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost nothing to traditional Republicans and can be expected to be anything but a figurehead.

So now my panic pendulum is swinging back from “this is kinda bad” to “this is a disaster”. I don’t know. I should just stop reading all these think pieces, right?

I was kind of hoping I could go see Fantastic Beasts today, but it doesn’t open until next week. Here’s an idea: get on the train and go over to the Met Breuer, and see the new Kerry James Marshall exhibit. And, hey, the Paul Klee exhibit looks pretty good too!

Weird Al and Weird Art

My weekend didn’t go exactly as planned, but it went well. I skipped the Star Trek thing, and instead went to MoMA and saw the new Kai Althoff exhibit. It was interesting, but easy to make fun of, if you’re the kind of guy that likes making fun of modern art. The NY Times review is a bit harsh, I think, but, yeah, it would have been fine to see the paintings without having to step around an old suitcase full of dirty dishes.

The Weird Al concert was as good as I expected, with a few fun surprises. I’ve seen Al twice before, so I was already familiar with a lot of the stuff he typically does as part of his stage show. There was a brief guest appearance by Lin-Manuel Miranda, which I wouldn’t even have known about if I didn’t see it on Facebook the next day. (At the time, I didn’t catch his name, and I wouldn’t have recognized him, even if I was seated close enough to see him clearly, which I wasn’t.)

I stayed overnight in an embarrassingly fancy hotel, and went home Sunday morning. Then, after I got home, I drove down to south Jersey to visit a friend. Normally, I would consider that to be a bit too much activity for the weekend, and… I would have been right about that, since my neck hurt quite a lot on Monday. I managed to get through it all without any migraines, at least, but I was definitely in some pain yesterday. And today, the neck pain is gone, but I feel like I might be coming down with a cold. So I’m limping my way through this week, and hopefully I’ll get myself back on the straight & narrow soon enough.

Met Gala

My Twitter feed tonight is full of photos from the Met Gala. The Times had a good article today explaining a bit about the Gala, and how it works. The whole thing is kind of ridiculous and leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though it is all kind of amusing, I guess.

I’m not a big fan of the Costume Institute, and generally don’t get much out of their exhibits. It doesn’t seem to me like the kind of stuff that should even be in the Met. But I know I’m probably in the minority here. And while the Gala apparently makes a lot of money, it seems like all of it is used to fund the Costume Institute and not other departments at the Met, if I understand it correctly. If they were using some of that money to buy up a few new Monet or Cezanne paintings, I’d be all for it. But I guess some of the Costume Institute exhibits bring a lot of people (and ticket money) into the Met, in general, so that’s something.

I was at the Met yesterday, and checked out the Vigée Le Brun exhibit again, and the new Pergamon exhibit. And I’m looking forward to a sunny day, so I can see the new roof garden installation.

2 Art Worlds: Flush MoMA, Struggling Met

The [Met] will undergo a 24-month financial overhaul that it said was likely to include staff reductions, reduced programming and a concerted effort to increase revenue in its restaurants and retail operations.

Source: 2 Art Worlds: Flush MoMA, Struggling Met

I love both the Met and MoMA, but if I had to pick only one to support, it’d be the Met. I’m much more a fan of the older stuff at the Met than the newer stuff at MoMA. Reading this article, I feel kind of bad for throwing out the annual appeal letter I got from the Met this week. On the other hand, I see in the article that they spent $3 million on their recent “rebranding”, which I really think was completely unnecessary.

As to MoMA, I won’t feel bad about throwing away any supplemental appeal letters from them, since they just got a $100 million donation from David Geffen.