So you’re at a gallery—now what? The fact is, nobody knows what art is or why people make it. This is blatantly disturbing. Some say the function of art is to generate conversation—an unpleasant thought. I’m not sure we want to put art in the same category as skin disease and Carl Winslow: things to talk about on the internet.
This is why so many of us have a bad time at galleries: we try to make art Interesting when we should just let it be weird. Art should never be Interesting.
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns
on May 22, 2013 -
186 comments
For the past three months, the Art Institute of Chicago has been putting their
Launchpad videos, designed to provide more context of museum-goers at the Institutes, on YouTube. The short videos include modern artists recreating art using ancient, medieval, and newer techniques in mosaics, glassblowing, pottery, painting, silversmithing, marquetry, and coin production plus conservation of art. There are also a few videos focusing on individual pieces in the collection.
posted by julen
on May 20, 2013 -
7 comments
“When I was doing my Post-Doc at UCL I used to go to the British Museum to relax, and work in the beautiful library there, so I chose the space for the mix. I wanted to capture the ambient atmosphere in the central courtyard, so I did some binaural recording to include in the mix. I also wanted to make the mix something of an exploration through history and ideas in line with the contents of the museum, so I brought in lots of disparate music spanning the centuries and continents. I also mixed it in a way to be like a journey though the museum, turning corners and regularly coming across something totally different and unexpected, with each track being like a different exhibit. Hence the name of the mix, in that, each piece of music almost has a visual content.” --
Max Cooper & The British Museum [more inside]
posted by empath
on Apr 21, 2013 -
11 comments
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has many "educator resources" on Korean art, Islamic geometric design, African art, and more (i.e. books filled with beautifully reproduced images of art and artifacts, along with extensive background history). They are
available for download as PDF files.
[more inside]
posted by benito.strauss
on Mar 11, 2013 -
8 comments
The permanent collection of the (US) National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago contains more than 2,500 pieces of art by 250 artists, all of which can be seen at
NVAM Collection Online. The site includes biographical material on the artists who created the work.
Featured Artwork.
A small selection.
(Via. Images at links in this post may be nsfw, and/or disturbing to some viewers.)
posted by zarq
on Nov 12, 2012 -
1 comment
The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History uses the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection as the starting point for a deeply informative, chronologically arranged exploration of world art history, with maps, timelines, art images, thematic essays, and more.
posted by Miko
on Sep 19, 2012 -
7 comments
Sure, the follies of art-speak are easy to laugh at, but often criticism of it begins and ends with a dismissive chuckle – which ignores profounder problems. Why should academic terminology be the default vehicle for discussing art? Why is there such an emphasis on newness, schism and radicality? Even when the art itself may be enjoyably throwaway, language pins it to deathlessly auratic registers of exchange. This suggests a subliminal fear that, if the subject in question is not talked up as Big and Culturally Significant, then the point of fussing over it in the first place might be called into question, bringing the whole house of cards tumbling down - Dan Fox, the associate editor of frieze magazine, discusses the contemporary art scene in detail.
posted by The Whelk
on Apr 12, 2012 -
43 comments
Timelapse Intersection Articulée à Montréal In October, 2011, the Contemporary Museum of Monteral presented "Intersection Articulée", an interactive installation from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. It was composed of 18 projectors of 10k watts each, visible from ~9 miles (15km) away. Here's some time lapse video results, with music.
posted by Goofyy
on Apr 6, 2012 -
5 comments
The House of Sharing is a place for the Halmoni to to live together and heal the wounds of the past while educating the future generations of the suffering they survived.
The View From Over Here details her visit to the House of Sharing, a therapeutic group home and museum for surviving "comfort women", who were systematically raped by the Japanese military during World War II. The museum displays art for and by the survivors. Via
Ask a Korean.
[more inside]
posted by ignignokt
on Dec 17, 2010 -
5 comments
Did you know that there's an art museum on the moon? A tiny, tiny one. The
Moon Museum features works by
Forrest "Frosty" Myers (the instigator),
Robert Rauschenberg,
Claes Oldenburg,
Andy Warhol,
David Novros, and
John Chamberlain, inscribed on a little chip of silicon and
surreptitiously transported to the moon's surface on the Apollo 12 mission. But of course there's a mystery, in this big of a secret:
who is John F., the engineer at least partially responsible for smuggling the chip onboard the lunar lander?
Related:
other stuff people have left on the Moon (!)
posted by fiercecupcake
on Nov 22, 2010 -
19 comments
There are
Real Fake Buildings,
Real Fake Watches,
real fake books, and of course, "
The Internet's LARGEST Selection of Real Fake Rocks!"
But for truly high-end fakes -- the "realest" of the fakes -- there's the
Museum of Fakes in
Southern Italy, or even better, the
Museum of Art Fakes in Vienna, which includes etchings from "last living master forger from Germany."
"The Museum of Art Fakes, almost directly opposite the Hundertwasserhaus, is unique in Europe. It is filled with paintings from not only world famous forgers (such as van Meegeren, Tom Keating, David Stein, Konrad Kujau, Edgar Mrugalla, Lothar Malskat), but also so-called ‘identical-forgeries’ of Schiele, Klimt, Monet, Raffael and many more."
posted by not_the_water
on Jun 4, 2010 -
19 comments
HEIST: Paintings by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger, worth ~$100 million, stolen! (Washington Post link)
[more inside]
posted by OmieWise
on May 21, 2010 -
54 comments
Museums build some pretty cool websites. To help people find them, use them, and give them props, the Museums and the Web conference has held an annual Best of the Web contest since 1997.
This year's nominees are here. Just a sample:
the MOMA on Bauhaus, the Center for New Media's
Bracero History Archive, the Textile Museum of Canada's
In Touch:Connecting Cloth, Culture, and Art, Perception Deception from The National Science and Technology Center of Australia,
The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh from the Van Gogh Museum, the Smithsonian's
Prehistoric Climate Change and Why it Matters Today, and more . If that doesn't wash out the remainder of your Friday, you can always dig into the
past nominees.
posted by Miko
on Mar 26, 2010 -
8 comments
It's not uncommon for the mayors of two cities locked in sports competition to make
friendly wagers. But, do the cities' art museums do too? Apparently, they
do.
posted by Leezie
on Jan 28, 2010 -
26 comments
Art Museum for sale. Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its
Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik.
The LA Times makes the
Madoff connection.
posted by R. Mutt
on Jan 26, 2009 -
29 comments
The Evoluon was a museum dedicated to science and technology, and the place of technology in society. It was closed for the public in 1989 and has not been re-opened as a public museum since. Watch the wonderfully 60s
promotion (worth it just for the soundtrack).
[via]
posted by tellurian
on Dec 5, 2008 -
12 comments
The UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History has an extensive,
searchable online collection. It focuse on material art and household items and has objects from all over the world. The website can be browsed either by geographic orgin:
Africa,
Asia,
North and Central America,
Pacific,
South America, or through its two exhibits,
Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives and
Fowler in Focus. Some of my favorite objects (but really, everything is entrancing) are
The Blind Scholar (
a Taiwanese handpuppet),
Chikunga (
a Zambian mask) and a
stirrup spout bottle which looks like a puma eating a piglet (
Peruvian). All items have accompanying descriptions and some have short texts or audioguides with further information.
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 23, 2008 -
3 comments
