A few days ago I posted an item about a sign in the new Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle that forbid visitors from taking pictures of one of the pieces there. Along the way I informed the world that photos were also banned in the New York City subway. Wrong!
In 2004, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which runs the system, made a …
I plan to stay late at work tonight to watch the State of the Union address with my news-obsessed colleagues at Time. Meanwhile I’ve been planning a visit this week to the Cartier-Bresson show at the International Center of Photography a few blocks from my office. And in advance of that, I’ve been paging through a copy of Henri …
As a college student in the early ’70s I made a visit to East Berlin, where I got an interesting lesson in how far a paranoid regime would go to control the circulation of images. It was forbidden to take pictures of all kinds of things there, including taxi cabs, supposedly because they could be used as military vehicles in the event …
I had a chance last week to spend a couple of days going over the wonderfully intricate new Olympic Sculpture Park that Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi of Weiss/Manfredi designed for the Seattle Art Museum. The park, which slopes down to the waters of Elliott Bay, is actually located about seven blocks from the museum, which in May …
There’s just something about Angelina Jolie that makes people think “Madonna”. The Madonna in the Bible, not the Madonna who adopts African babies, just like Angelina. (Though come to think of it, sometimes Angelina makes people think of that Madonna too.) In any event, the painter Kate Kretz generated some press and blog chatter …
With the rise of “starchitects” it’s become a well understood strategy for developers to seek out the starriest and attach their big names to any project that might be controversial because of its size or location. Actually, it’s a practice that long predates starchitecture. As far back as the late 1950s the developers of what would …
Sleepwalkers, Doug Aitken’s large scale video projection onto the outside walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York premiered Tuesday night. It was a disappointment. Aitken’s piece consists of five separate silent narratives, all of them projected simultaneously, each following the same general arc over the course of its 13 …
I wanted to briefly revisit the subject of my last posting, about the announcement that the Italian art researcher Maurizio Seracini will resume his attempt to determine if completed portions of The Battle of Anghiari, Leonardo’s never finished and long lost masterpiece, might be hidden behind a wall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. …
In Florence last October I had a chance to catch a fascinating show about Leonardo da Vinci at the Uffizi Gallery. It focused in one part on The Battle of Anghiari, the never completed mural by Leonardo that has been one of art history’s most bitterly regretted lost works since it disappeared in the mid-16th century. In anticipation of …
Alice Walton’s failed attempt last year to buy The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins’ 1875 canvas of an operation being performed by a Philadelphia surgeon, Dr. Samuel Gross, led me recently to pick up Portrait, the brisk new biography of Eakins by William S. McFeeley, and to take a new look at Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, Eakins’ hard …
Remember when I promised a few days ago to get off this topic? (“This topic” being how rare it is for artists to do anything with the universal ordeal of flying.) I lied. I’m back to it, but just briefly. Thanks to Jason Kaufman of the Art Newspaper for reminding me that the Swiss artist-pranksters Peter Fischli and David Weiss have a …
Or is it fear of more flying? I promise to get off this topic after today, but in anticipation of a return flight tomorrow that will take off in bad weather, I found myself thinking more about something I blogged about yesterday, how rarely you find contemporary art that’s concerned with the mundane experience of flying and airports. …
A cross country trip this weekend made me wonder why artists have done so little with the common experience of flying. I don’t just mean pictures with planes in them. Gerhard Richter, James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein have all done those, though all of them used warplanes. I mean the banal stuff of civilian aviation, the airports, …
