Category: Odds & Ends
Friday, February 02, 2007
A New Look at New York’s “Master Builder”, Robert Moses
Robert Moses had a remarkable career as New York City’s parks commissioner from 1934 to 1960, and as leader of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority from 1934 to 1968. During his long reign, he oversaw a radical transformation of New York through the construction of bridges, expressways, and public parks, and the clearance of vast areas of slums. Although Moses has been seen as a caricature of a ruthless bureaucrat, a new exhibition presents an opportunity to see his achievements and his battles in a more balanced way.
The exhibition, “Robert Moses and the Modern City”, is being shown at three locations: the Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum of Art, and the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. Through images, models, and scholarship, the exhibitions delineate Moses’ successes—highway projects that integrated cars and nature, a number of well-designed public pools, and the renovation of Central Park; as well as his dark side—displacing many families and destroying functioning neighborhoods. In the end, the viewer realizes that the issues facing cities today are not that much different than those Moses faced: choosing between a respect for the past and an embrace of the future.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Art collector Charles Saatchi creates an online hangout for artists
Charles Saatchi, a British art collector best known for discovering unknown artists and helping them achieve successful careers, has added an interactive feature to the website for the Saatchi Gallery in London. Called “Your Gallery”, or “Stuart” (short for “student art"), this feature allows artists from around the world to exhibit their work electronically, as well as to communicate with other artists and keep tabs on what’s happening in the world of art. So far, the site is exhibiting work from about 20,700 artists. There’s a discussion board where artists can share advice, ideas, and inspiration, make new friends and get exposure. The site also offers art news and reviews, a chat room for art enthusiasts, and a page where children can create and display art.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Actors lend their voices to podcasts on art
In recent years, many museum visitors have discovered the joys of using audio guides to enhance their visits to special exhibitions as well as to permanent collections. Standing quietly in front of a painting, letting my eyes take it in while through earphones a mellifluous voice explains the background and history of the work, and what to look for—this seems to me to be the ideal museum experience.
Now, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has taken audio accompaniment to a new level, by producing podcasts. The first one, in October 2005, featured the actor Kevin Bacon reading from van Gogh’s letters. It was heard by about 16,000 people on iTunes and the Met’s web site, and even made the list of the 100 most-listened-to podcasts on iTunes.
That first production was experimental, and its success has led to other podcasts; for example, Sam Waterston can be heard telling the life story of Queen Hatshepsut (for “Hatshepsut, From Queen to Pharoah"), and punk rocker Johnny Rotten talks about the rise of punk style in England in the 1970s (for the exhibition “AngloMania").
The commentaries can be found at the Met’s website, www.metmuseum.org, on the pages devoted to current exhibitions, where they can be downloaded, subscribed to, or listened to on streaming audio. What a great way to add a new dimension to the appreciation of art.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Photos from a land “south of the clouds”
More than 250 people from 60 villages in northern Yunnan province, China, have been given cameras by the United States-based Nature Conservancy. The pictures they have taken provide a record of endangered traditions and landscapes. A nuimber of these photos are now on view at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The exhibition is titled “Voices from South of the Clouds”, a reference to Yunnan, which is Chinese for “south of the clouds”.
Among the photos, some give a panorama of what may be a vanishing way of life: healing rituals and animal sacrifices. Some celebrate scenic splendors which the photographers hadn’t fully appreciated until they saw it in a photograph. Others document hardships: children collecting firewood, or writing their homework on the side of a basket as they accompany their parents to farm plots.
A hidden world, now brought closer by the magic of photography.
Monday, October 10, 2005
The Ghost in the Photograph
With Halloween rapidly approaching, it seems like a good time to go on a ghost hunt. And where better than the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult.
You’ll see portraits of living people accompanied by ghostly images of friends or loved ones. There are levitating chairs, magical fire, mediums in the grip of dramatic trances, and evidence of ectoplasm, a substance believed to be a material representation of the spiritual world. All very easy to dismiss in broad daylight, perhaps, but on a dark and stormy night....who knows?
Monday, August 01, 2005
Children’s drawings document a tragedy
Researchers from Human Rights Watch recently visited refugee camps in Darfur, in southern Sudan. While there, they gave drawing materials to the children in the camps. The drawings these children produced are powerful and saddening, a testimony to man’s inhumanity to man. A traveling exhibition of the drawings, sponsored by Human Rights Watch, will bring the message to people in cities across the United States.
Take a look at the drawings and see if you can remain unmoved.
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
A passion for fonts
I’ve always loved typefaces, or fonts. Most people don’t spend much time thinking about them—but they’re everywhere. Everything you read-- every sign, book, and logo—is in a font. Most of the time, if they’re doing their job well, fonts send a message --either overt or subliminal. The rest of the time, they’re discreet, succeeding at not being noticed.
An article in yesterday’s New York Times pointed me to a couple of websites that are fun to visit for anyone with an eye for design. You can turn your own handwriting into a font at www.fontifier.com; at Spell with Flickr you can enter any word you like and have it spelled back to you in a variety of letters borrowed from street signs, Scrabble, and shapes in nature; or you can play the ”Retail Alphabet Game”.
Have fun!
Friday, April 29, 2005
In the eye of the beholder…
How you look at a painting can make all the difference in what you see there. For many of us, abstract art can be puzzling. And the work of minimalists (monochromatic works, for example, or canvases with nothing more than a single line) can have us scratching our heads and asking, “What are the limits of painting? What is the absolute minimum a painting can consist of and still be a painting: single shape, single color, single image, or no image at all?”
Our expectations have a lot to do with what we perceive. There’s a story about an art collector who meets an artist at a bar, and tells him about a show he had just seen of abstract paintings composed only of a flat colored ground bisected by a single line. “How simple can an artist be and get away with it?” he asked.
The painter asked him if the paintings were all the same color. The answer was no. And did all the lines run the same way? No, some were horizontal, some vertical. And were all the lines painted the same way? No, some had sharp edges, others rough; some wide, others thin. And were all the canvases the same size? Again no. The same proportion? No, yet again. “Well”, said the artist, “it sounds damned complicated to me.”
Take a look at the work of Barnett Newman, for instance, and decide for yourself.
Friday, April 15, 2005
Happy Birthday Leonardo
Google could’ve chosen to note today’s special significance (to Americans, anyway) by posting a logo somehow representing the agony of the tax deadline. Instead, they chose to honor the anniversary of the birth of someone more significant than any staffer of the IRS: Leonardo da Vinci.
Yes, that da Vinci, of The DaVinci Code fame. It’s his 553rd birthday today.
In addition to creating the whimsical logo (by Dennis Hwang), Google linked to a great list of resources on all things da Vinci.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Visiting Montmartre with Toulouse-Lautrec as guide
The current exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, is a wonderful introduction to this unique section of Paris. In the late nineteenth century, Montmartre became the heart of a daring, often racy, entertainment industry that lured thrill-seeking Parisians to its dance halls and cabarets, circuses and brothels. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, though born into an aristocratic family. lived in this working-class district for most of his career, and his art is closely linked to its raucous spirit. Although many other artists, such as Degas and Van Gogh, also lived in Montmartre, Toulouse-Lautrec is most well known for his portraits of its people and atmosphere. Walking through this exhibition is like entering his world, looking over his shoulder as he creates his posters and paintings.
