A few weeks ago, I went to the Museum of Modern Art to finally see Trisha Donnelly’s Artist’s Choice show. Donnelly is the tenth artist to participate in the series, which involves the museum allowing someone to dig around in its collection and create an exhibition out of whatever pieces he or she likes. Donnelly’s selections are framed less as a unified, cohesive exhibition and more as offshoots of the permanent galleries, with three scattered rooms given over to her curatorial whims on the fourth and fifth floors. When I was there, viewers wandered in easily, often not realizing they had strayed from the prescribed permanent collection path.
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Need an afternoon snack? Check out what Pop artist Claes Oldenburg has for you at MoMA.
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When I first heard about Tilda Swinton’s “The Maybe,” an ongoing performance piece in which the actress sporadically sleeps in a glass box at the Museum of Modern Art, I sighed and shrugged and laughed a little. Another unoriginal work becomes a cultural flashpoint — cause for media outcry, cause for real, live spectacle, an unexciting performance sold to ticket-buying tourists as avant-garde. What can you do? But “The Maybe” wormed its way into my head, and I found myself confoundedly returning to it often. It was only a week or two later, and after reading Jason Farago’s takedown in The New Republic, that I realized why I cared: middlebrow.
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If, like Woody Guthrie lamented, you’ve got no home and are just roaming around, you still need a place to shelter from the storms of spring, the scorching summer heat, the autumn winds, and the chill of winter. In the Applied Design exhibition that recently opened at the Museum of Modern Art, a giant golden cube that caught my attention turned out to be a rather creative solution to portable shelter.
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New York’s East 53rd Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, is full of nondescript Manhattan skyscrapers. In the courtyard of one of these clinically clean buildings, however, there are five crumbling, old slabs of concrete covered in graffiti. It’s hard to believe that these blocks, so out of place in their surroundings, were once part of one of the most politically charged structures in the world, one that divided the globe in two based on ideology and geopolitics — the Berlin Wall.
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The Museum of Modern Art wants to use your home videos to decorate its storied lobby and atrium for its next PopRally party. The catch? The submissions have to be totally abstract, and just one minute long.
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While the New York Public Library is reconsidering their architecture through a luminous, yet radical, Norman Foster proposal that would modernize the Schwarzman Building and reconfigure its stacks into reading areas, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is unearthing the architect who popularized those sun-dappled reading rooms in the first place. Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light at MoMA might sound like a rather dry design exhibition, but it’s really a quite compelling in-depth look at a 19th century architect whose own radical ideas have an influence too often forgotten.
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How well designed is your coffee mug? Our personal design heroine and all-time curator crush Paola Antonelli appeared on the Colbert Report last night to critique all those everyday objects we take for granted in advance of her next big show at the Museum of Modern Art.
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Last week, I witnessed an art event I thought would possibly never occur: the Museum of Modern Art made a serious step forward in recognizing the cultural importance of graffiti writing and hip hop at their fascinating panel discussion, “Writers and Writers: Narrative on the Page and in the Street.”
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With a brand new year comes a slew of new museum exhibitions to look forward to. From retrospectives of major artists like Claes Oldenburg and James Turrell to an exploration of New York City art during one year in the 1990s, here’s a look at what to expect from NYC’s art museums in 2013.
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