Today NYTimes featured sketches of the Whitney’s satellite space off the Highline. It’s kind of awesome. I wonder how the new location will affect the types of shows they put up. Also will the new space bring fresh energy to their exhibition design.
I saw this show at the Guggenheim & it was amazing – now I know I
intern there, but this one by
Cai Guo Qiang called “I believe” is amazing. I want you all to go -
it’ll blow your mind! [Also for those of you with the babies - it's a
kid friendly show - no naked biker chicks on the backs of the
boyfriends bike a.k.a the previous show ]
Highlights
1. 9 cars suspended from the ceiling in a free fall with lights coming
out simulating a car bomb
2. Manmade river with a raft boat that adults can get into and push
themselves down the stream [seriously!!!!]
3. A pack of wolves running along the rotunda that eventually take off
(you can walk with the pack)
4. Live artists sculpting life size sculptures from an earlier
imperialist period – sculptures only meant to last for duration of
show
5. Fireworks & gun powder
Check out the video of the installation
http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/exhibition_pages/cai.html
Go & be inspired!
Tonight Cynthia Smith, curator at the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum will be speaking at Pratt’s Brooklyn Campus.
Thursday, November 15 2007
6:30 PM
Main Building (Brooklyn) Room 230
Last week a New Jersey man was arrested for the theft of a 1778 Goya painting insured for $1 million from an unattended truck. The man arrested was a fellow truck driver. Here’s the kicker, the arrested truck driver claims he found it in his basement!
The painting was on its way from the Toledo [Ohio] Art Museum to the Guggenheim. It was recovered within days – as I mentioned in another truck driver’s basement- this was last November -er…the truck driver was arrested last week. Amazingly, the Toledo Museum agreed to re-loan the piece to the Guggenheim in February 2007.
This article is a little blistery. It’s about who makes better art administrators – specifically museum directors – curators or businessmen?
It’s important to note that the article was written by Dr. Peter C. Marzio director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Dr. Marzio’s bio indicates that his rise to directorship was though the curatorial rather than the businessman’s route.
Which makes this quote from the article sound a bit derogatory.
So many non-profits, like museums, have become havens for mediocre managers.
Businessmen who fail at business and curators who cannot keep their jobs often turn to museum administration as their “true” calling.
It’s over now but check out some footage.
The first video gives overview set to a rocking tune (Baby I’m a renegade?), the second is a close up of the Italian Pavillion. Click here to scan for footage from other pavillions.
Biennale 2007
Italian Pavillion
I haven’t seen this show yet. Immediately I wonder about viewing Florentine objects out of context. Granted these original gates no longer hang in the entryways of the Baptistry – so maybe they’re out of context anyway in the Duomo Museum – but in Florence you can see the reproductions and then walk a short distance to see the originals.
Most of the historic sculptures, frescoes and edifices of early-15th-century Florence are not the least bit portable. It’s simple: You want to see them, you go to Florence. But right now nearly a third of one of the city’s greatest glories can be seen without leaving town, by visiting “The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Earlier this month BH Friedman, a close friend of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and our professor Janet Kardon, spoke to our class. He read from his 1972 biography Pollock: Energy Made Visible, the journals he kept of his experiences with many of the artists of the New York School, and shared a part of art history that he had and continues to live first hand.
Friedman has written catalogues and monographs for artist friends like Lee Krasner, Alfonso Ossorio, and Robert Goodnough. His other works include biographies on Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and – of course- Jackson Pollock. In his alternate life as realtor, construction company owner and trustee of the Whitney Museum of American Art, he oversaw the construction of the Madison Avenue building designed by Marcel Beauer in 1966.
The world wide web describes him as a novelist, biographer, playwright, and art critic.
The things that came up in our lecture:
Required
(3) Art History Theory & Methodology
(3) Materials, Techniques & Conservation
(3) Thesis
Distribution Electives
(2/3) Film/Design
(3) Architecture
(3) Non- Western
(3) Pre-Renaissance
(3) Renaissance/Baroque
(2/3) 19th or 20th century
French or German language requirements
Not sure about this one – but they have interesting programs
