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Don’t Forget Fashion 时装 Moda МОДА

Almost completely left out of the Jeffrey Deitch-organized Art in The Streets at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art and minimally referenced in its exhibition catalogue and other recently published surveys of graffiti and street art, the historical importance of Fashion 时装 Moda МОДА has been lost to a generation of artists and graffiti-lovers. It’s time for that to change.

Posted inOpinion

Required Reading

Jeff Koons’s art collection, thoughts on LA MOCA’s questionable art history, Invader in Paris, a tour of the Calatrava building in Milwaukee, something fishy about Warhol, iPhone photography and corporate culture and the US government … all on this week’s Required Reading.

Posted inArt

Pantheon Puts Street Artists Behind Glass

Across the street from the Museum of Modern Art at West 53rd Street is an exhibition that might be unexpected for those expecting only Van Goghs and Picassos. Pantheon: a history of art from the streets of NYC is an attempt to create solidified narrative of street art history, to pin down this ephemeral art form into something more lasting, and more didactic. The team behind Pantheon, including co-curators Joyce Manalo and Daniel Feral, have put street art behind glass, creating a visually striking display that actually manages to insulate the art from the viewers, divorcing street art from its natural context. Though this art is visible from the street through the space’s huge plate glass windows, this is not street art in its most literal (and historical) form.

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Everyone Wants to be First

There is apparently something about institutional street art shows that move museum folk towards declarations of their firstness. Street Art at the Tate Modern in 2008 was billed as “the first major public museum display of Street Art in London” while just last winter Hugh Davies, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, glowed that he was “really proud” to be “the first (American) museum to do an international street art show of this scale and scope.”

Art In The Streets, the latest and of course much buzzed exhibition opening at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art is billed by MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch as — surprise surprise — “the first exhibition to position the work … from street culture in the context of contemporary art history.”

Posted inOpinion

Graffiti Writers Start a Game of Tag with LA’s MOCA

Raise your hand if you’re not surprised that LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art is getting tagged by a whole bunch of graffiti writers because of the upcoming Art in the Streets show? Well, Katsu is doing his part on the heels of an attention-grabbing faux MoMA/Nike ad series he pulled off in New York a few weeks ago. According to 12ozProphet, the massive Katsu fire extinguisher tag has some supporters in the upcoming museum show.

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Graffiti’s US History & Art in the Streets: Interview with Roger Gastman

On April 17, MOCA LA’s Art in the Streets exhibition opens. The show, which was organized in roughly a year or since Deitch became director of the institution, promises to be a major exploration of street art, graffiti and skateboard culture at one of the country’s most important contemporary art institutions. Today, I spoke to one of the exhibition’s curators, Roger Gastman about his important new book, The History of American Graffiti, which he co-authored with Caleb Neelon, and the MOCA show.