Quay Brothers Retrospective at MoMA. Robert Barker/Cornell University Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets, at the Museum of Modern Art, features this décor “They Think They’re Alone,” from the film “Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies.” More Photos » But this is what the Museum of Modern Art has accomplished for the elaborate puppet-centered parallel universe brought forth by the experimental animators known as the Quay Brothers. At once a marvel and a marathon — first punctuated and then dominated by numerous video screens and projections that deliver more than seven hours of moving images — it pays tribute to the life’s work and artistic saga of Timothy and Stephen Quay (pronounced kway), identical twins who were born in Norristown, Pa., near Philadelphia, in 1947, segued into film after an early career as illustrators and have worked primarily in Europe since the late 1970s. Twelve Artists Who Make Marfa, Texas, a Cultural Destination.
Join the Crew of Tom Sachs's DIY Mission to Mars at Park Avenue Armory. Tom Sachs, dressed in khakis and a white short-sleeve collared shirt complete with pocket protector, stood at a control panel in the front of the Park Avenue Armory’s cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall, his face lit by a bank of dozens of television monitors.
Slowly, deliberately, the artist called out over walkie-talkie to his similarly uniformed assistants spread throughout the mammoth hall — “Camera one, okay, camera two. Rockets. Camera four. Space.” A video sequence gradually filled the central monitor depicting a space shuttle taking off from its launch pad, gushing smoke. Sachs has filled the Armory with an installation that tells the narrative of his personal mission to Mars, an obsessive, warped, and funny replication of everything from the Apollo Lunar Module to a handmade moon rover and a space-friendly Japanese teahouse (they have to take their human culture with them to Mars, one attendant commented).
Visitors to the Armory are welcome to pretend right along. Shock-seekers snap up new Aussie art dare. Smell This Shit – It’s Art. How China Went from Art-Market Afterthought to World Auction Superpower. The year 2011 delivered three seemingly incredible statistics that confirmed the status of China as a major power in the global art world. In March, Artprice, the online clearing-house for art market data, declared China the world’s largest art market based on the total value of fine art auction sales in 2010.
Three months later, France’s auction regulator, the Conseil des Ventes, released its annual report on the world’s top auction houses and included no fewer than 5 from China in its top 10. Moreover, 10 Chinese houses made the Conseil’s top 20. Two of them, Poly International Auction and its archrival, China Guardian, took third and fourth places, respectively. More than the others, that last result signaled the scale of what has been happening in the auction rooms of Asia. New tastes, new names, and new modes of operating are in play, and no one seriously interested in the art market can afford to ignore the scene any longer.
Hong Kong On the Mainland The Wild, Wild East. Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New Guidebook. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Enticements from the new Met guide: “Hypocrite and Slanderer,” above; “Kneeling Bull Holding a Spouted Vessel,” right; and “Aquamanile Depicting Aristotle and Phyllis.” You may think that guidebooks put out by museums to highlight their most prized possessions should be on the endangered list too. Or maybe not. Consider a new one for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Equipped with a soft but durable cover and about the dimensions of a middleweight novel, “The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide” (distributed by Yale University Press, $24.95) displays in 449 pages images and brief descriptions of 600 of the Met’s nearly two million works. The first new edition in almost 30 years, it has a more appealing design than the old one, whose narrow dimensions and almost marginless pages jam-packed with reproductions and text gave it the feel of a mail-order catalog.
The semiotic implications are rich: Is this what art is for the West: Exotic, erotic, lawless? ‘The Dawn of Egyptian Art’ at the Metropolitan Museum. Karsten Moran for The New York Times A detail of a sculpture of a bound captive that formed part of a temple threshold on display in the “Dawn of Egyptian Art” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. More Photos » This style’s consistency is, if you think about it, frightening. It bespeaks an authoritarian power that was consolidated under the first Pharaoh around 3100 B.C., and that, despite political ups and downs, maintained a firm grip on the country’s aesthetic program for nearly three millenniums. The duration of Egyptian art may dull curiosity about how it began, since it is hard imagining a time when it didn’t exist. But of course everything starts somewhere: the high Egyptian style did not spring fully formed from the forehead of Osiris, god of the afterlife.
This is demonstrated by “The Dawn of Egyptian Art,” a sublime, view-shifting exhibition at the dominated foremost by small, startlingly personable sculptures and vessels from around 3900 to 2649 B.C. Guggenheim and UBS Project Plan Cross-Cultural Program. The project, to be financed by UBS and called the Guggenheim UBS Map Global Art Initiative, will begin with South and Southeast Asia. The museum will invite a curator from each region to New York for overlapping two-year residencies; they will work with a team of Guggenheim curators to identify new and recent artworks that best reflect the range of talents in their areas.
The artworks they choose will be acquired for the Guggenheim and will also be the focus of exhibitions that open at the New York museum and then travel to two other cultural institutions. Guggenheim officials are currently in discussions with museums in Singapore and Hong Kong about taking the first show. The exhibitions will be supplemented with a series of public and online programs based on the theme of cross-cultural exchange. “We are hoping to challenge our Western-centric view of art history,” said Richard Armstrong, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation. Ms. ‘Colorful Realm,’ Works by Ito Jakuchu at National Gallery. These thoughts were crystallized for me by one of the most beautiful exhibitions I have ever seen: “Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800)” at the National Gallery of Art here.
The show brings together for the first time outside of Japan two parts of a suite of paintings that Ito Jakuchu (pronounced ee-toe ja-ku-chu) made for the Shokokuji monastery in Kyoto. Created between 1757 and 1766, it consisted primarily of 30 bird-and-flower scroll paintings collectively called “Colorful Realm of Living Beings.” The series is widely and justly considered one of the supreme masterpieces of Japanese painting. To give the nature pictures a divine focus Jakuchu also produced a triptych representing the Buddha and two bodhisattvas, all luxuriously enthroned.
In the interest of preservation the monastery donated the “Colorful Realm” paintings to the Japanese Imperial Household in 1889 but kept the triptych. It is a metaphysically pointed arrangement. Gallery: Programs: Japan Society. Sri Arts :: Functional Arts: Indonesian Art. In Texas, a Tradition of Museums That Showcase the Quirky. ‘In Vibrant Color’ - Harry Warnecke - National Portrait Gallery.
¶“I Love Lucy” wouldn’t have been as funny in color. ¶Gen. George S. Patton wouldn’t have been as fearsome in color. ¶Charlie McCarthy wouldn’t have been as believable in color. ¶Cowboys ought always to be photographed in black and white after the age of 30. The exhibition is called “In Vibrant Color: Vintage Celebrity Portraits From the Harry Warnecke Studio,” and it consists of color photographic portraits of 24 noteworthy people from the last century whom we’re more accustomed to seeing in black and white.
Lucille Ball is there, and Jimmy Durante, and Laurel and Hardy. Warnecke, who died in 1984, was a photographer for The Daily News in New York who understood early — in the 1930s — that a newspaper with a color photograph in it would have an edge over the competition. Though various forms of color photography had existed for decades, the Everyman color snapshot was still a ways off, and certainly a color print in a newspaper was a rarity. W. Russian Real Estate Magnate Takes on Putin With Appropriation Art Show on the Upper East Side. Most people don’t associate Russian protest art with mansions on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but Soviet-born real-estate-developer-turned-art-collector-turned-artist Janna Bullock found a fitting venue for her installation, “Allegories & Experiences,” in the bare space of a Beaux Arts house on East 82nd Street.
Sparked by the massive demonstrations in Russia in late 2011, the exhibition — Bullock's response to the 12-year rule of Vladimir Putin — is timed to coincide with the country’s March 4 presidential elections. "The latest developments are quite fascinating and I think as with any dictatorship, no matter how bulletproof it seems, it comes to an end," Bullock says, explaining the motivation behind the work.
"And it is my responsibility – and the responsibility of anybody who has position, knowledge, expertise, and will – to make sure that people understand that dictatorship is not forever and they have to stand up for themselves and they have to speak. " ‘The Steins Collect,’ Matisse and Picasso, at the Met. 2012 Whitney Biennial. Smithsonian making 3D models of items from its collection. What do you do when you're the world's largest museum but can display only two percent of the 137 million items in your collection (a mere 2.75 million) at any given time?
In an effort to get more of their treasures into the public eye, specialists at the Smithsonian Institution's 19 collective museums and galleries hit upon the solution of digitizing their collection and 3D printing key models and displays suitable for traveling exhibitions. It's a tall order, but one that's sure to give the rapidly blooming business of additive manufacturing a huge boost. View all In the past, whenever curators wanted to duplicate an object, they turned to traditional rubber molds and plaster casts.
Now, with the Smithsonian's budding digitization initiative coming up to speed, teams can deploy expensive minimally-invasive laser scanners to generate virtual models of items in the collection with micron-level accuracy. Source: SPAR Point Group via CNET A native San Franciscan, Randolph attended the U.S. Burgonet. "Chambord". ‘The Ungovernables - 2012 New Museum Triennial’ Librado Romero/The New York Times The Ungovernables: 2012 New Museum Triennial Danh Vo's “We the People,” copper fragments of a full-size replica of the Statue of Liberty, is featured in this triennial. More Photos » How true this is of their art turns out to be highly debatable, but the show does look and feel different from its moody, jangly predecessor.
Writing in the catalog, the curator, Eungie Joo, director of education and public programs at the New Museum, sets the 2012 triennial in the context of, among other things, the recent Occupy movement. The reference is getting old now, but you can see its point. The exhibition that she and her assistant, Ryan Inouye, have assembled is appealing in the way the human megaphone is. Almost throughout, it’s a thing of small, light formal gestures, unemphatic in tone and socially engaged, though in an unperturbed way that accommodates friendliness and wit. Mr. Art Project, powered by Google.