Seemingly all of the United States was put into a fashion frenzy last week when it was brought to the media’s attention that the Ralph Lauren-designed uniforms for the 2012 US Summer Olympic team with their all-American flair (and hideous berets) were produced in China.
Art
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Spinning Art with an iPad App
LOS ANGELES — Circles are endemic to the art world. Who you place in your circle — and who places you in theirs — is an act of social currency, particularly important in a world often run by social relations. But circles are also beautiful, forming iconic architecture like the Guggenheim in New York, religious imagery like Tibetan mandalas, and, of course, Kandinsky’s famous circles.
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The Curator Is Present
No, the artist was not present at Film Forum for a screening of her documentary, The Artist Is Present, a couple of weeks ago. The artist is Marina Abramović, and though she wasn’t there — neither was the director of the film, Matthew Akers — I kept expecting her glamorous self to storm in as a last-minute surprise. But who was there was the reason I showed up for the screening: Mr. Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator at large of the Museum of Modern Art and director of MoMA PS1.
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Watcher from the Skies: Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park Series
Beginning in 1968, in an act of governmental largesse unlikely to be repeated any time soon, the Bureau of Reclamation of the U.S. Department of the Interior invited forty artists, all expenses paid, to create works documenting its water reclamation efforts in the West. Among those asked to participate was Richard Diebenkorn, who traveled in 1970 to the Columbia River valley and Salt River in Arizona for five days of expansive looking, taking in landscape views from a promontory and making several overhead passes in a helicopter. Long fascinated by aerial perspective, he found himself “boggled” by what he saw. “Whenever there was agriculture going on,” he later recalled, “you could see process — ghosts of former tilled fields, patches of land being eroded.”
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Single Point Perspective: How To Join The Club and Live Happily Ever After
Lichtenstein and Warhol might have been using the same source material, but they were hardly after the same things, as the latter’s subsequent work would quickly make clear.
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Boyz 2 Men: A Detroit Artist’s Sonic Youth
So much iconic American literature portrays, often humorously, neglected or badly treated boys doggedly tracking down adventure (Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Nick Adams). For these protagonists, play is not a luxury but a lifeline. Matt Zacharias’ episodic, mixed-media exhibition Childhood, Boyhood, Sonic Youth is just such a journey. The show starts off with a search for dad, or at least for things solid and male, but winds up somewhere else.
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The Secret Life of Paintings
Last weekend in a Doylestown, Pennsylvania—which boasts not one but two locally owned, well-stocked bookstores—I picked up an old Phaidon edition of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy for ten bucks.
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Mark Boulos at MoMA: “All that Is Solid Melts into Air”
Mark Boulos’s two-projector video installation at MoMA, “All that Is Solid Melts into Air” (2008), is a chilling investigation into two separate but entwined worlds.
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Good Intentions and Big Ideas: Feel Good Grants That Exploit Artists and Reduce Arts Funding
The people behind the ZERO1 Fellowship got one thing right — “public policy is increasingly ill-equipped to manage a society with the kind of boundless creativity that technology like the Internet enables.” What they seem to get wrong is the notion that this is a grant program that serves to directly benefit the arts, or at least one artist.
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Twitter as Art
After thinking through the idea of Tumblr as art, I began to find the difference between various social media platforms glaringly obvious. Marshall McCluhan’s phrase “the medium is the message” came to mind. How do settings and mediums change or possibly mandate artistic intention? After exploring Tumblr’s unique qualities, I wanted to expand the focus to another relatively new platform for artistic creation, Twitter.
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New York’s First Street Art Auction Happening This Fall
They have been going on for years in Europe, but there hasn’t been one in the US, until now. Doyle New York, the Manhattan auction house, will be hosting their Inaugural Street Art Auction on October 16, 2012.
