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starladyToday I went up to New York with sparrow_hawk to see the Tim Burton exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. We had a good time, needless to say.
It's the first time I've been to MOMA since it reopened after its renovation (which is actually sort of shocking to me, really), and at this point it's probably superfluous for me to say that the new building is pretty awesome. But it is; there are clever windows situated in interesting places throughout the building so that while viewing the art one can also view one's fellow viewers, often in the act of viewing. It's charming, even on days like today when the museum is a cattle run.
I really enjoyed the Tim Burton exhibit; I'm not going to claim (as the exhibit doesn't) that he's a giant of contemporary art, but he is unquestionably an artist with a consistent and characteristic vision who has brought that vision to life in various media with persistence, dedication and imagination. Also, particularly in his sketches done while he was bored at Disney, he has quite the sense of humor. Vis-a-vis the fact that what has to be his best movie (The Nightmare Before Christmas) was done in collaboration with Henry Selick, who actually directed it,sparrow_hawk and I wound up musing about whether it's always necessary to have a collaborator with whom one can refine one's ideas. Certainly comparing Nightmare to, say, The Corpse Bride suggests that the answer is yes.
One of the things brought up implicitly in the documentary The Art of the Steal is--not what art is, but how it ought to be experienced. The Barnes Foundation was intended to provide an intimate, almost early modern experience with many works of art at once, while MOMA and the large cultural institutions are providing a much more industrial experience--works of art isolated on white walls while one jostles many other people to look at them (and, in MOMA, while people every so often take flash photos of the art because they don't know how to work their cameras). Certainly the latter is more democratic, and there's quite an irony in the fact that Albert Barnes was a self-made millionaire and a Democrat who set up a foundation to provide a much more aristocratic interaction with art. But some of the coolest things in MOMA today were the artworks that are participatory, particularly Yin Xiuzhen's Collective Subconsciousness, which is a de-reconstructed van in which one can sit and chill while listening to a Mandarin pop song and is really freaking cool, and something in the mezzanine about which I cannot find anything on the website, but which involved a table and two chairs in the center of a klieg-lit square at which people could sit if they wished, the whole thing being filmed for use at some later date. In other words, these experiences were participatory. The other thing I really, really liked was the installation of several of Claude Monet's water lily paintings, including one of his monumental three-panel ones, which really have to be experienced directly to be grasped, but which are an amazing experience on multiple levels; it's not a coincidence, I think, that the water lily paintings are in a separate, less-trafficked gallery.
ETA: On further reflection, though, it seems that this obsessive and characteristic vision--this ability to keep revisiting the same subject (matter) and to see in it something different, or to see it in a different way, with every look--is common to artists, full stop: Monet and his water lilies, Burton and his monsters, they keep going back and seeing things no one else could no matter how often they looked. /eta
That said, though, the permanent collection is clearly amazing (though not quite on the level of the Barnes in the 1880-1940 department; I snark because I have opinions) and we didn't spend enough time there, since after fighting our way through the Tim Burton exhibit we were ready to be finished. Probably the thing to do is to go back on a weekday afternoon.
Then at McNally Jackson I found a copy of Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, which is not only back in print as of 2009 (I ♥ you, Wesleyan University Press) but revised. I'm not sure how that could be more awesome--oh wait, it could have cost less than $30 for a paperback. Ah well, it's totally worth it.
sparrow_hawk to see the Tim Burton exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. We had a good time, needless to say. It's the first time I've been to MOMA since it reopened after its renovation (which is actually sort of shocking to me, really), and at this point it's probably superfluous for me to say that the new building is pretty awesome. But it is; there are clever windows situated in interesting places throughout the building so that while viewing the art one can also view one's fellow viewers, often in the act of viewing. It's charming, even on days like today when the museum is a cattle run.
I really enjoyed the Tim Burton exhibit; I'm not going to claim (as the exhibit doesn't) that he's a giant of contemporary art, but he is unquestionably an artist with a consistent and characteristic vision who has brought that vision to life in various media with persistence, dedication and imagination. Also, particularly in his sketches done while he was bored at Disney, he has quite the sense of humor. Vis-a-vis the fact that what has to be his best movie (The Nightmare Before Christmas) was done in collaboration with Henry Selick, who actually directed it,
sparrow_hawk and I wound up musing about whether it's always necessary to have a collaborator with whom one can refine one's ideas. Certainly comparing Nightmare to, say, The Corpse Bride suggests that the answer is yes. One of the things brought up implicitly in the documentary The Art of the Steal is--not what art is, but how it ought to be experienced. The Barnes Foundation was intended to provide an intimate, almost early modern experience with many works of art at once, while MOMA and the large cultural institutions are providing a much more industrial experience--works of art isolated on white walls while one jostles many other people to look at them (and, in MOMA, while people every so often take flash photos of the art because they don't know how to work their cameras). Certainly the latter is more democratic, and there's quite an irony in the fact that Albert Barnes was a self-made millionaire and a Democrat who set up a foundation to provide a much more aristocratic interaction with art. But some of the coolest things in MOMA today were the artworks that are participatory, particularly Yin Xiuzhen's Collective Subconsciousness, which is a de-reconstructed van in which one can sit and chill while listening to a Mandarin pop song and is really freaking cool, and something in the mezzanine about which I cannot find anything on the website, but which involved a table and two chairs in the center of a klieg-lit square at which people could sit if they wished, the whole thing being filmed for use at some later date. In other words, these experiences were participatory. The other thing I really, really liked was the installation of several of Claude Monet's water lily paintings, including one of his monumental three-panel ones, which really have to be experienced directly to be grasped, but which are an amazing experience on multiple levels; it's not a coincidence, I think, that the water lily paintings are in a separate, less-trafficked gallery.
ETA: On further reflection, though, it seems that this obsessive and characteristic vision--this ability to keep revisiting the same subject (matter) and to see in it something different, or to see it in a different way, with every look--is common to artists, full stop: Monet and his water lilies, Burton and his monsters, they keep going back and seeing things no one else could no matter how often they looked. /eta
That said, though, the permanent collection is clearly amazing (though not quite on the level of the Barnes in the 1880-1940 department; I snark because I have opinions) and we didn't spend enough time there, since after fighting our way through the Tim Burton exhibit we were ready to be finished. Probably the thing to do is to go back on a weekday afternoon.
Then at McNally Jackson I found a copy of Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, which is not only back in print as of 2009 (I ♥ you, Wesleyan University Press) but revised. I'm not sure how that could be more awesome--oh wait, it could have cost less than $30 for a paperback. Ah well, it's totally worth it.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-08 04:07 (UTC)There's a Delany-related movie screening this Tuesday down in SoHo: http://sohodigart.com/calendar.html I'm still up in the air if I'm going to go.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-08 04:12 (UTC)And yes, I am depressingly certain that The Jewel-Hinged Jaw is going to queue-jump my to-read pile with a vengeance. …Damn, that sentence has a lot of hyphens.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-10 05:25 (UTC)- awesome Indian crepes (since i can't remember what they were called)
- the weird subway connections due to the construction
- whatever was going on at Washington Square (not that we actually figured it out)
Anyway, it was a good day and I'm definitely going back to the MOMA. *does a dance commemorating how awesome the Water Lilly paintings are"
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-10 22:38 (UTC)-I try not to memorialize annoyances like that.
-Good question.