Category Archives: Art

MoMa’s website redesign

The Museum of Modern Art has redesigned their website.

Posted on March 6, 2009 in Art · · Comments closed

One & Other 100 days of live sculptures in the UK

Antony Gormley is a sculptor trying to create a live sculpture portrait of the UK over the course of 100 days.

Every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days without a break, a different person will make the Plinth their own. If you’re selected, you can use your time on the plinth as you like. One & Other is open to anyone and everyone from any corner of the UK. As long as you’re 16 or over and are living or staying in the UK, you can apply to be part of this unforgettable artistic experiment.

The project is entitled One & Other and will begin it’s course in July of 2009.

Posted on March 3, 2009 in Art · , · Comments closed

The Mugrabi family art collection

Despite the current recession, the Mugrabi family has not slowed down its consumption of art. The Mugrabis own what is believed to be one of the largest and most valuable private collections of art in the world.

A few minutes earlier, Jose had been talking about the incongruity between the day’s financial news and the auction frenzy, and ventured an interpretation: “When the empires fall — Roman, Greek — all that is left is the art.”

While the José Mugrabi and sons buy up art at a feverish pace, they also meticulously protect its value, even if it requires that they overbid and inflate the prices to dictate the market value.

For a time in the early 1990s, Mr. Mugrabi teamed with collector Sammy Ofer, a collector Romanian shipping magnate who provided capital. In 1992, he hired Alberto, then 22 and a college graduate, to troll the backrooms of New York galleries for Warhols. “Nobody else wanted them, so we’d clean them out,” Alberto says. By the late 90′s, major collectors noticed Warhol prices rose whenever the Mugrabi family joined the bidding. “I’d see them and think, ‘Oh, here we go again,’ because I knew I wouldn’t win,” says London collector Tiqui Atencio. “They would always outbid me.”

What’s great about the Mugrabi family’s mentality toward art and buying art is the youthfulness of the act. While reading the NY Times feature on José Mugrabi and his sons, I imagined them to be much younger and whimsical, allowing the art to really dictate their passion and fervor for buying and collecting art. They actually look more like very astute businessmen.

Posted on March 2, 2009 in Art · , · Comments closed

Torsten Solin – Flowers

A series of kaleidoscope images, featuring you know what, by Torsten Solin.

Posted on February 27, 2009 Also posted in Photography · , · Comments closed

Aquellos ojos verdes

One of my all-time favorite scenes (in a Wong Kar-Wai film) taken from In The Mood For Love. Apologies for Chinese subs over Chinese dialogue. Sucka! Inspired by Steven’s comparison of Slumdog Millionaire’s cinemetography to WKW’s Chungking Express.

Thanks, Hard Liquor, Soft Holes.

Posted on February 23, 2009 Also posted in Film · , · Comments closed

Jenny Holzer

Alongside such greats as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer’s text-based public art creates a vacuum in which dialogue between the work and it’s audience is confronted. It reminds me a lot of a live piece, which I can’t seem to recall, of thousand of pages of redacted and censored declassified CIA documents on torture, projected onto the wall of NYU’s Bobst library. Text, when presented and/or ommitted, can be a very powerful vehicle despite it’s ordinary presence. They still release heavily redacted documents today, almost prompting one to wonder why they even bother to declassify top-secret files if they’re going to black everything out anyway.

(Thanks, @larssss.)

Posted on February 19, 2009 in Art · , , · Comments closed

Art and Fear

Amazing quotables from a book by David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear, that tackles the process in which all self-proclaimed artists (and non-artists alike) struggle to overcome in the creation of art.

This book is about making art. Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people – essentially (statistically speaking) there aren’t any people like that. But while geniuses may get made once-a-century or so, good art gets made all the time. Making art is a common and intimately human activity, filled with all the perils (and rewards) that accompany any worthwhile effort. The difficulties artmakers face are not remote and heroic, but universal and familiar.

That’s my problem. I’m hiding out in my bat cave, scheming for what’s next to come. I forget about the intense rush of productivity, inspiration, and fearlessness I experience in the moment of doing, rather than thinking. Art is very backwards like that.

Art is human; error is human; ergo, art is error. Inevitably, your work (like, uh, the preceding syllogism) will be flawed.

What accompanies my feelings of accomplishment is usually a bit of disappointment. Errors and flaws that I’d so very much like to ignore end up rearing its ugly head, and it deflates my high hopes. But it makes no difference. In order to survive, I’ll just have to bite my tongue and keep creating.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

I’m going to buy this book, sit down and completely pulverize the content into my brain, and see how I orient myself after. Fear can drive you, but it’s pushing me in the wrong direction right now.

Thanks, kottke.org.

Posted on February 17, 2009 in Art · , · Comments closed

Yuken Teruya’s toilet paper roll art

A remarkably intricate series of cutouts from everyday toilet paper rolls by Yuken Teruya.

Via booooooom!

Posted on February 16, 2009 Also posted in Design · · Comments closed

Milk and honey necklace

Stephanie Simek uses peculiar materials to produce a range of rather unique jewelry pieces.

The simple pendant necklace features a real honeycomb beeswax form that is preserved in a plastic coating. this pendant hangs from a sterling silver chain that is interwoven with a milk protein-based fibre that gives it a white glimmer. The combination of the two is unexpected, but familiar at the same time.

I quite like the gold-lined quail egg necklace as well.

Via designboom.

Posted on February 16, 2009 Also posted in Design · · Comments closed

The Merzbau

Kurt Schwitters, formally known as Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters, was a German painter who worked on various elements of what would become installation art.

This took place very gradually; work started in about 1923, the first room was finished in 1933, and Schwitters subsequently extended the Merzbau to other areas of the house until he fled to Norway in early 1937. Most of the house was let to tenants, so that the final extent of the Merzbau was less than is normally assumed. On the evidence of Schwitters’ correspondence, by 1937 it had spread to two rooms of his parents’ apartment on ground floor, the adjoining balcony, the space below the balcony, one or two rooms of the attic and possibly part of the cellar. (via Wikipedia)

Via hcimmi.

Posted on February 12, 2009 Also posted in Design · , · Comments closed

Nikki S. Lee

I’ve been an admirer of Nikki S. Lee‘s work since I learned about her series, Projects, exploring various sub-communities within greater America. She would impose a physical transformation and blend in with a particular group of people and create self-portraits using a simple disposable point and shoot. The allure of her images come in the intimacy and hyperbole of her presence, quite obvious in some and in others very inconspicuous. What is left unknown is the actual process, whether or not her subjects are privy to her espionage. Regardless, she is fully immersed in her role, and each photograph expands on many facets of cultures that we seem to put our own boundaries on.

In her series, she extends to various groups of people such as strippers, skateboarders (where she actually learned how to skate, decked out in dreads), senior citizens, and lesbians, to name a select few.

Theme Mag does a great interview with Nikki in 2005 detailing her thoughts on success and her internal dialogue with the work she creates. Her mentality seems to allow the work even more elusive, as she recognizes the transiency in which the work was made, as well as her success.

I’m not a person who usually gives advice. I feel that life is evanescent. It’s like love. You love somebody— and for that period of time, you are so in love— but after you break up, you will forget. It will become just a memory. Life is just like that, impermanent and episodic. I’m always thinking that I could be dead tomorrow. I’m not a nihilist, but I’m always thinking “What is success, what is life?”

Her newer projects seem to go further into the exploration of the Asian diaspora and identity, going along the lines of memory, the past, the present, and everything in between.

I really subscribe to the idea of transformation when working in the medium of photography. It’s an added layer of meta-consciousness, where we are hypersensitive to the presence of the camera, our projected image, and the narrow view of the world we edit and how we choose to censor it through the lens.

 

Also, I met her at a film screening at MoMA in New York and have a huge Oedipus complex with her. It’s hard to believe such a soft-spoken person could adapt into so many roles seamlessly.

Posted on February 11, 2009 Also posted in Photography · · Comments closed