Required Reading
This week, GO Brooklyn stats, LA MOCA's big picture problems, postmodernism quo vadis, a posthumous memorial in NYC, Jeff Koons' 70% cut, fashion and homophobia, Ground Zero/Zuccotti Park and more.
This week, GO Brooklyn stats, LA MOCA’s big picture problems, postmodernism quo vadis, a posthumous memorial in NYC, Jeff Koons’ 70% cut, fashion and homophobia, Ground Zero/Zuccotti Park and more.
The Brooklyn Museum has published the statistics from last weekend’s GO Brooklyn open studios event and they’re pretty interesting:
- Estimated visitors: 18,000
- Estimated studio visits: 147,000
- Total participating artists: 1,708
- Total neighborhoods with participating artists: 44
- Total registered voters: 10,319
- Total voters who checked in to at least 1 studio: 6,106
- Total voters who checked in to at least 5 studios and are therefore eligible to nominate: 4,929
- Total studio check ins: 48,918
- Average number of studios visited per participant: 8
The LA Times looks at the problems at the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art and explains why deep pockets are not a cure all:
“On the board are five men who made Forbes magazine’s most recent list of the world’s billionaires and the wife of a sixth. Their combined assets come to $24.1 billion, by Forbes’ reckoning.
But this summer, the MOCA board has made headlines with dissension rather than donations — at a time when donations are badly needed, because money to run the museum has become uncomfortably tight.”
Hmmm … is postmodernism finally over? The journal Twentieth-Century Literature explores that question:
“While at least since 9/11 critics have been routinely declaring that postmodernism is, now, over, in the last five years an increasing number of critics have also begun to question whether postmodernism was ever a significant aspect of postwar American literary culture.”
The great modernist architecture Louis Kahn died in 1974 but his memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt is only about to open on New York’s Roosevelt Island. New York Times critic Michel Kimmelman makes the grandiose (over the top?) statement that, “It gives New York nothing less than a new spiritual heart..” He continues:
“In this respect the park is probably the closest Kahn came to pure abstract art, a virtual walk-in sculpture that does more than honor the 32nd president and bring to life a neglected but symbolic stretch of prime shorefront on an island soon to be transformed by a Cornell University campus.”
Vice magazine has a fantastic new video series, Fashion Week International, exploring fashion week around the world. If the topic sounds a little frivolous, the program delves a lot deeper than you might think as they venture to fashion week in Lagos, Nigeria, and discover that homophobia is alive and well in that nation and is has an impact on the fashion industry. Vice provides a broad social context for fashion and travels to Jamaica, Nigeria, Colombia, Cambodia, Rio and other locales to get the story.
Did you know that mega-artist Jeff Koons has a stipulation in his sales contracts that reads, “on re-sale Koons would be entitled to 70% of anything paid above the original price.” That’s a new one, isn’t it?
MoMA talks to the son of Libuše Niklová, the famed children’s toy designer from communist Czechoslovakia whose work is featured in the museum’s Century of the Child exhibition. He explains that his mother’s simple, playful and dynamic designs are still looked at today because:
“They are symbols of the 1960s, they carry the energy of those times.”
While yesterday, Hyperallergic Weekend’s Thomas Micchelli discussed Jackson Pollock’s sculptures, this article in Artnews goes further into why the Abstract Expressionist objects were often overlooked:
“It didn’t help that Pollock’s sculptures hardly resemble his drip classics. The humble objects don’t scream ‘Pollock,’ or action, never mind painting. Most of his extant sculptures, under a dozen, don’t even resemble each other. And their hands-on quality — hammered copper, hand-built clay — contradicts the popular image of Pollock conjuring his abstractions in a rhythmic ritual dance.”
And Mira Schor reflects on two “empty” lower Manhattan squares, Ground Zero and Zuccotti Park:
The problems of the 9/11 memorial and the political atmosphere that led to the Occupy movement are linked, as the reaction of the United States to the attacks of September 11 in some way was a disturbing mirror image of the forces that attacked on September 11 (a mirroring described in the 2004 BBC Documentary The Power of Nightmares, which posits parallels between the rise of the American Neo-Conservative movement and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and noting strong similarities between the two. In a way the destruction of the United States continued via its own internal processes of paranoia and ulterior political motives unrelated to the actual event – let’s just start its wasting of resources on a war on the “wrong” country … many others have developed these ideas better than I can do.
Everyone is excited that the Louvre’s new Islamic wing will open soon, and it should be a knock out!
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning EST, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts or photo essays worth a second look.
