I predict, that New Yorkers will welcome the Met’s announcement in its Tuesday press release, of plans for changes to its Fifth Avenue façade. Scratch that. There will be a lot of complaints.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced today the appointment of Sheena Wagstaff to the newly created position of chairman of the department of Modern and Contemporary Art.
You can bet most tourists (and some persuaded New Yorkers) will be gawking at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree this holiday season, but the tree at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has always been one of my personal favorites of decorated evergreens that spring up around the city for the holidays. Tucked away in the museum’s Medieval Sculpture Hall on the ground floor, the tree is a 20-foot blue spruce this year adorned with its traditional decor of 18th-century Neapolitan angels and cherubs.
Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculpture opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City this September with a display of 100 masterpieces borrowed from collections outside of Africa. At face value I thought the exhibition title sounded like an attempt ingratiate African art objects in to a positive and inspirational realm. This, along with the earthy brown color of the exhibition signage, felt clichéd. However I vowed to maintain an open mind as dealing with Africa as a continent loaded with colonial history, really creates a “damned if you do damned if you don’t” scenario for many curators.
Editors note: We reached out to Hyperallergic’s fashion contributor Alexander Cavaluzzo to tell us the top ten must-see fashion museums around the world. Here are his picks.
A humorous show, Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine, chronicling the history of caricature just opened at the Metropolitan Museum. It courageously mounts numerous prints and drawings that are unabashedly ribald, biting and comic.
Let the avalanche of September 11 exhibitions begin. As the tenth anniversary of the attack approaches, the art world gears up to remember and reflect with some of the bigger (and most intriguing) shows slated to run at blockbuster institutions like the Met, MoMA PS1 and the New Museum, as well as the opening of the Memorial Museum itself at the World Trade Center site on September 12. This Wednesday, I attended a small and intimate show at 7 World Trade Center that was a bit of quiet before the storm
If you had any question that the Metropolitan Museum was the reigning champion of museum attendance in the US, then their latest figures (5.68 million in FY 2011) should dispel any doubts.
Whether sequestered behind glass in a museum or sold to tourists along Fifth Avenue, the African mask is an image from the non-Western world that we are all familiar with. Yet walking though the African art galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day, I felt somewhat disconnected from the African mask. Severed from its intended use for performance and ceremonies, the mask as it is presented in the museum becomes an ambiguous object. Does the mask still have relevance when removed from its cultural context? Can we appreciate it for just its form? Is it art or artifact?
What becomes a legend most? How are those cultural superstars chosen, the ones whose very names invoke awe, wonder, or at least a gasp? Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, the comprehensive retrospective of the late designer’s ravishing raiment now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art certainly provides a clue. With an hour and a half wait to enter (on a good day), a de facto gala in his honor and almost unanimous praise from critics, the McQueen legend continues to thrive in the eerie, operatic halls of the exhibition space. He may have a spectacular artistic output, and he may have defined an era of rising fashion stars, but the question remains how his deification came to be, how he came to define 21st century fashion with a short, tragically romantic career.
