Remember the kid who climbed on the Donald Judd sculpture at the Tate Modern? Well, her parents have taken to the London Evening Standard to set the record straight. They want the world to know that their daughter, Sissi Belle, was only on the sculpture for a matter of seconds and meant no harm — and that the nine-year-old is “anti-establishment” anyway.
Tate Modern
Posted inOpinion
What NOT to Do with Kids in a Museum
Bushwick gallerist Stephanie Theodore is at the Tate Modern today and spotted this hilarious/sad/incredible/unbelievable (so many mixed emotions) scene of parents allowing their child to use a Donald Judd sculpture as a bunk bed.
Posted inArt
Two Pioneers of Arab Abstraction, Side by Side
LONDON — In a time of acute upheaval, there is something comforting about the concurrent retrospectives currently on view at the Tate Modern for two seminal Arab modernists, Saloua Raouda Choucair and Ibrahim El-Salahi.
Posted inNews
26-Year-Old Wlodzimierz Umanets Arrested For Defacing Tate Rothko (UPDATE 7)
The Metropolitan Police have just announced via Twitter that a man has been apprehended for the Rothko incident at the Tate Modern.
Posted inOpinion
People Who Aren’t Upset That a Rothko Was Defaced Today
The reaction in 140 characters or less after today’s Rothko incident at the Tate Modern has been overwhelming … including some people who seemed to enjoy the news.
Posted inNews
CONFIRMED: Rothko Defaced at Tate Modern (UPDATE 14: Rothko Family Speaks)
A Mark Rothko painting at the Tate Modern in London has been defaced by a vandal.
Posted inArt
The Long, Strange Art and Life of Yayoi Kusama
On the surface of this well-fueled publicity blitz, Yayoi Kusama is a dotty (pun intended) old grandma all about fun, polka dots and puffy balloons, including her eye-popping window display for the Louis Vuitton store on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. On the inside, which all the W magazine air kisses in the world can’t conceal, Kusama is about decades of raging struggles with precarious mental balance, gender, ethnicity, money, power, class, self-mythology, annihilation, life and death, peppered with a bit of wonder.
Posted inArt
15 New York Art World-ers on Art Controversies Today
With “sensitive to art and its discontents” written into the blogazine’s sub-header, Hyperallergic is no strange to contemporary art controversy, but we decided to ask 11 New York-based artists, critics and curators what they considers the most important and urgent controversy in visual art at the moment.
Posted inArt
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
Tino Sehgal Gets Turbine Hall Commission, But Will We See it?
The Tate Modern just announced its selection for the 2012 Turbine Hall commission, and the winner is none other than your favorite relational aesthetics artist and mine, Mr. Tino Sehgal. But with Sehgal’s outlawing of any photo documentation of his works, will we actually get to see the piece?
Posted inNews
Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds Prove Hazardous to Visitors and Staff
Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds at the Tate’s Turbine Hall space in London opened to a good deal of rejoicing. Viewers and critics alike were entranced by the installation, a field of 100 million sunflower seeds that were actually carved from porcelain. An abundance of press photos show exhibition-goers frolicking in piles of seeds, tossing them up into the air, making seed-angels and having a great time. HOWEVER! The Tate has since been forced to alter Ai’s exhibition due to health hazards: the tons of porcelain seeds were kicking up a fine ceramic dust, easily breathed into the lungs of art aficionados. Visitors can now only gaze at Ai’s piece from a cordoned off observation deck.
Posted inNews
Ai Weiwei Spreads a Sunflower Seed Carpet at Tate’s Turbine Hall
Ai Weiwei, internationally famed artist and chief provocateur of the Chinese art world, opened his London Turbine Hall installation today, the eleventh, and first for an Asian artist, in the Tate’s Unilever series of exhibitions.
The installation forms a gesture both classic for the artist and yet totally unexpected: a carpet of sunflower seeds now covers over 1,000 of the Turbine Hall’s 3,400 square meters of floorspace, in total over 150 tons. Photos from afar show an unmeasurable expanse of gray, a rectangular infinity that calls to mind Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s candy fields: part minimalist, part maximalist. The seed carpet is visually stunning, but beyond its striking appearance, the installation has a deep political, historical and social background.
