Richard Serra may be best known for his curving steel wall sculptures, but his earlier works erred even more on the side of conceptually abstract. The artist’s 1967 “Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself” kicked off a body of work in which a single verb directly translated into art. Check out “Hands Scraping” (1968) above.
February 8, 2011
Whitney and Foursquare Create Ticket-Discount Badge
Unlike MoMA’s Marina Abramovic check-in badge, the Whitney’s new Foursquare collaboration is no joke. After using your smart phone to check in to the museum twice, plus once at a site pulled from the Whitney museum’s history, users will receive the “Whitneyphile” badge, which also grants holders a $5 ticket to the museum.
What Is the Most Expensive City to Visit Museums?
According to Leah Sandals’s charticle over at This Magazine, titled “Admission Impossible,” the answer to that question may be Toronto. Gaze at her chart and be amazed.
An Arts Collective Grows in Greenpoint
In organizing Greenpoint Open Studios, I was introduced to some 160 amazing artists producing a variety of works in their studios. Painters, photographers, sculptors, video artists and performers are all sprinkled around the neighborhood, but one collective whose studios I was most charmed by is Fowler Arts Collective. The 20-artist collective is housed inside the infamous Greenpoint Terminal House, once the largest rope mill in the world, a recent victim to a suspicious raging fire, and now host to film shoots, a wooden furniture shop and of course, artist and studio space not unlike that found at art school.
WTF is… Relational Aesthetics?
The standard cliché summary of modern (and contemporary) art is that now, anything is art. Jackson Pollock threw paint around. Duchamp strung up a shovel, upended a bike wheel into a stool, put a urinal on a pedestal and called the resulting three “sculptures” art of the highest order. After so long, we’ve started to run out of things to suddenly deem “art.” But relational aesthetics, or the posing of an artist-constructed social experiences as art making, is the latest step in this process of turning everything into art.