Required Reading

Some women in front of de Kooning’s women paintings at the MoMA exhibition (photo by the author)

This week’s edition focuses on the de Kooning retrospective at MoMA, some essays on the 9/11 Museum, an endangered mural in Manhattan, the timeline design of Facebook and Instagram as art.

Everyone in New York is talking about the Willem de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. We have yet to chime in on the topic here at Hyperallergic, but until then, enjoy these links to various discussions of the art work:

Holland Cotter loved it.

Teri Tynes does a close “reading” of de Kooning’s masterpiece, “Gotham News” (1955).

Tyler Green looks closely at the artist’s “Excavation” (1950).

And Charlie Finch doesn’t like the late work.

And two interviews with the curator, John Elderfield, one with Dan Duray at New York Observer, and another with Kyle Chayka at Artinfo.

Hal Foster writes about the “struggle for the American soul” at Ground Zero in the London Review of Books. He discusses the work of Catalan artist Francesc Torres, who was commissioned by the 9/11 Museum to photograph the 80,000 square-foot interior of the Hangar 17 every day in April 2009. The hangar, located at JFK, was where roughly 1,200 pieces of steel and other objects from the World Trade Center site were warehoused.

Martin Filler reviews the 9/11 Memorial in the New York Review of Books:

It is generally held that great architecture requires the participation of a great client, but just how this stunning result emerged from such a fraught and contentious process will take some time for critics and historians to sort out.

If someone forks over $70,000, it looks like a gigantic mural by the Canadian-Mexican painter Arnold Belkin can be saved. The 39 year-old mural in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood (located in the May Mathews/Alexandra Palmer Park). Some believe it may be the only outdoor work that Belkin. It is titled “Against Domestic Colonialism” (1972).

Infographic designer extraordinaire Nick Felton was hired by Facebook a little while back, well, here is a description of his influence on the Facebook timeline (h/t @fmerlino):

If Timeline is successful, it could alter how people absorb data not just on Facebook, but also on the rest of the Internet (making a lot of money in the process). How? Simply by turning everyone into Nicholas Felton.

Superhot photo-sharing app Instagram has inspired an art show in London.

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links (10 or less) to long-form articles, videos, blog posts or photo essays worth a second look.