Museums

Post image for The Impossible Curation of Schiaparelli and Prada

It’s inevitable not to compare the new show at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute to last year’s blockbuster, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, however unfair that might be. But it doesn’t matter, because Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, a pairing of two disparate designers that gives far too much precedence to the latter, falls flat, regardless of what preceded it.

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Post image for Imaging Urban Park Utopias

This past weekend the renovations of Washington Park and the J.J. Byrne Playground outside the Old Stone House in Park Slope were unveiled to a cacophonous crowd of thrilled children and their parents. Fittingly, I was there to see Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space, an exhibit on the second level of the Old Stone House coinciding with the park’s reopening that invited artists to respond to the ideas of bringing play to public spaces while being conscious of community and urban development.

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Post image for Free-Floating on the 13th Floor: Caroline Cox at the Clocktower

Moving through Caroline Cox’s immersive installations at the Clocktower, the venerable exhibition space on the 13th floor of a city-owned building in Lower Manhattan, is like peeling free from gravity. Although you don’t literally leave the ground, the sculptures’ pulsing aureoles do their best to convince you otherwise. One moment you’re in the institutional-white hallway of a neglected municipal building and the next you’re among star clusters and jellyfish, crepuscular clouds and aggregating amoebae.

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Museums

Occupying Minds, Not Streets

by Xin Wang on May 1, 2012

Post image for Occupying Minds, Not Streets

Mounting an exhibition anywhere in the neighborhood of occupation aesthetics can be precarious nowadays, for people are increasingly fed up with the same reiterations of ideological conceptualism and the ultra–politically correct, derivative works that skim the surface of real world problems precipitated by global capitalism, government incompetence, dictatorship and injustice. But Beijing-based artist Chen Shaoxiong had a rather pragmatic impetus for reconsidering — through art — global phenomena from the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to democratic elections that have sprung up in remote Chinese villages.

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Post image for Screens, Networks and Our Imagination

When I visited JODI’s current exhibition, Street Digital, at the Museum of the Moving Image, I wondered how the notorious duo would take their earlier net art practices into the “street” (or gallery). Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans of JODI became well-known in the 1990s for upending traditional internet experiences with their online artworks. From wwwwwwwww.jodi.org to http://404.jodi.org/, they presented abstract code and programming glitches as art, bringing the background source of digital works into the foreground. Their work looked more like a crash of your web-browsing program rather than a coherent, readable text.

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Museums

Lights Out? Detroit's Quick Fix

by Colin Darke on April 27, 2012

Post image for Lights Out? Detroit's Quick Fix

DETROIT — The clichés of 1960s drug culture are now on full display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit during Joshua White & Gary Panter’s Light Show.

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Post image for Scripted Wars, Towers of Power

The United States, under the leadership of George W. Bush, launched its unprovoked, premeditated invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003. On November 20, 2004, the Museum of Modern Art opened its 630,000-square-foot Yoshio Taniguchi-designed building.

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Post image for Marfa to Vegas: The Good, Bad and Ugly

A road trip that encounters all kinds of art from Marfa to El Paso to Vegas.

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Post image for Rembrandt’s Brush: A Ghost Story

Rembrandt’s “Portrait of the Artist” (ca. 1663–65) from Kenwood House, London, just landed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a seven-week run.

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Post image for The Power of Luxury at the Metropolitan Museum

The Met’s Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition is a treat for viewers who appreciate the ways that power and continuity are expressed in both luxury items and everyday objects.

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