Last June, artist Steve Mumford visited the National Gallery in Kabul to explore the artistic heritage of the war-torn nation. He has written a short account of his visit — along with a few dozen photographs of what he saw — for Artnet.
Museums
Prague itself is like a museum, where contemporary architectural gems are situated next to old landmarks. It’s an embarrassment of riches. One day we walked through Prague’s 10th century castle district, then went down the hill a couple of blocks to find a Frank Gehry-designed office complex, and continued throughout the city to see Baroque, Gothic, Art Nouveau, and Cubist buildings. But if you had to visit just one Prague museum, it would have to be the Veletrzni Palac (Fair Trade Palace), a truly massive collection of Czech and European work originally built in 1925 for trade fairs.
Over at MoMA, there are two big survey shows that focus on a single theme throughout the history of photography from the heyday of the daguerreotype through to the present. The first, Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, is an “installation that comprises more than 200 works by approximately 120 artists.” The second is an examination of photography’s relationship to sculpture titled The Original Copy: The Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, that “brings together over 300 photographs, magazines, and journals, by more than 100 artists” … A good exhibition is not a numbers game. And in Pictures by Women, which is a little diffuse, it shows.
Everything that matters happens in an office these days. To survive in today’s world, one can’t help but burn with curiosity about why some rise to the top while others gets stuck at the bottom box of the organizational chart. The Office, Mad Men or The Devil Wears Prada all hit this nerve with verve. But what’s been missing for me is that spunkier imagery and wilder narrative that video art can get away with. Cao Fei fills this void in spades with her 2002 video “Rabid Dogs” on view till Sunday at the Asia Society.
We perceive architecture, Walter Benjamin thought, in two ways: optical and tactile. There’s a progression over time in our optical perception of something that develops from looking at something into contemplating it. Black scratches to letters to a sign to an idea. But Benjamin didn’t think there was a tactile analog to contemplation when it came to perceiving something through touch.
The Golden Door is the anachronistic nickname of Jersey City, which acquired the moniker at the turn of the 20th century when it was a magnet for newly arrived Ellis Island immigrants. Today, it is the name of a new temporary mini golf course-cum-art exhibition organized by the Jersey City Museum as an innovative new summer fundraising idea that explores the idea of immigration and interactive “art.”
There is a constant dual narrative with Warhol between reality and fantasy, the physical and the mechanical, the life lived and the life watched on a screen, and Warhol, in the end, found it all to be one in the same. This exhibit of Warhol’s late work, Andy Warhol: The Last Decade, is no exception to the contradictions and in fact reveals just about as much as it obscures.
Senior editor of Antiwar.com and editor of BushwickBK Jeremy Sapienza unpacks some of the history of artist Marina Abramović to understand the power of her recent performance.
The last day of the Marina Abramović’s “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA was marked by a frenzy of activity both IRL and online. The veteran performance artist has proven that her art form has come of age and it can hypnotize a whole city — and art world — into believing or “unbelieving” that she’s the biggest game in town.
The Dundas Street façade of Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario has been overtaken by a massive block-long banner created by propaganda-inspired artist Barbara Kruger. Titled “Untitled (It)” (2010), the block-long Kruger feels polite and subdued — two words, strangely, often used to describe the city of Toronto itself.
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Lyra
Stephanie Gokhman
Jeremy Sapienza
An Xiao
Jeffrey