There has been a fair amount of buzz surrounding Carsten Höller. His “mid-career” retrospective/whole building takeover of the New Museum opened last week. Determined to see for myself, I wandered into the space last Friday with a relatively open mind. My only previous knowledge of the artist was from his installation of slides in the massive turbine hall at the Tate Modern in London a couple of years ago. His installation there was pretty well received. Though I never saw it in person, it is easy to imagine how the installation fits into the Tate’s turbine hall shtick. Like Olafur Eliasson’s sun, or Ai Weiwei’s field of sunflower seeds, Höller’s slides were engaging and dramatic. They served as an anti-pretentious pallet cleanser, a preparatory shot of courage before heading into the art-soaked wilderness of that museum.
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This Occupy Museum effort is the most peculiar Occupy Wall Street/art-related thing I’ve heard about yet. A protest is slated for tomorrow and intends to “occupy” the Frick Museum, MoMA and the New Museum.
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A little birdy told us that there’s a flashmob brewing tonight at the New Museum called “The Perfect Match.” We’re not sure of the details yet but we hear it will have quite an ending! Stay tuned as we find out more. UPDATE: We hear through the grapevine that the New Museum is doing everything possible to crush this burgeoning Flashmob, so we’re not sure what this will mean for this things success (and this bad weather ain’t going to help either).
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What the hell is that diamond-shaped object floating in the sky? A photographer shot this unidentified object from the New Museum’s Sky Room Terrace, according to his testimony on a UFO site.
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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
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Dear Merce Cunningham,
As your company comes to a close this winter, I have been on the look out for all things Merce. Wanting to understand you better and hoping that I could still understand you even after you have passed, I visited Charles Atlas’s video tribute to you now at the New Museum not just once, but twice.
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The specter of communism currently haunts the New Museum in its summer “bloc-buster” exhibition “Ostalgia.” It’s an ambitious project that consumes most of the galleries with a swirling conglomeration of disparate mediums, artists, scales and concepts that reflect the miasmic atmosphere of post-Soviet territories.
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Seven on Seven is an annual conference hosted by Rhizome and the New Museum that pairs seven artists together with seven technologists to collaborate on projects created in a 24-hour period. The event’s second outing was last Saturday, May 14. The first question that came to my mind while attending the event was — what exactly is a technologist? Through the presentation speeches and Q+A sessions that showed off the series of thought-provoking collaborative artworks, I began to get an inkling of what the word might mean, and what its implications could be. But at a time when new media artists are technological innovators and software developers are artistic creators, where do we draw the line?
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Can’t figure out how to fill up your culture diet this weekend? We’ve got your back, with Williamsburg Gallery Night going down tonight and Man Bartlett’s 140 hour-long Berlin performance streaming all weekend, plus Su Friedrich’s MICROSCOPE Gallery opening and the Seven on Seven art-tech collaborative event on Saturday.
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As part of the Festival of Ideas For the New City anchored by the New Museum, a group of major artists have sprinkled the Bowery with murals. In collaboration with the Art Production Fund, painters including Mary Heilmann, Richard Prince and Jacqueline Humphries created murals for the roll-down metal gates of restaurant supply stores on the historic street. The trick is that these murals are only visible at night, after the stores close. Over the course of one evening’s sunset, I went on a scouting mission to photograph the works in their native habitat. Click through for the photo essay.
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