3,536 exhibitions online

September 16, 2016 6:48 AM

The Museum of Modern Art has digitized a HUGE amount of material from past exhibitions. The history goes all the way back to the founding of MOMA in 1929. Exhibition catalogs are available for download as pdfs!
posted by OmieWise (16 comments total)

This is enormous. I just picked a reprint of the Machine Art show catalog (judged by Amelia Earheart, no shit) a few months ago. So much fun in these archives. Here's another good one.
posted by phooky at 7:02 AM on September 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Great. Now they can sell off a small fraction of the 200,000 items in their collection, the vast majority of which will never be seen by the public in person (but are available online), get rid of the $25 admission fee, and greatly expand their hours instead of locking everyone out at 5:30 pm almost every day.

The argument in full is here: Museums Can Change—Will They? Our great art institutions are cheating us of our artistic patrimony every day, and if they wanted to, they could stop.

Let me know when that happens, will you?
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:22 AM on September 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

a lot of the 200,000 items in their collection are stuff like this, so good luck funding that :(
posted by phooky at 8:21 AM on September 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

You can download the images too, which isn't super-common among online digital collections. I'm pretty pleased with this. Good job, MOMA.
posted by Fister Roboto at 8:26 AM on September 16, 2016

Oh, yeah! This is such great timing. I spent a lot of time recently trying to find this in greater detail on the web, and it was nowhere I looked. This group exhibition is absolutely what I would use a time machine to go back and see.
posted by heyho at 9:00 AM on September 16, 2016

Is this a Trumpesque huuuuuge or just a standard huge amount?
posted by Confess, Fletch at 9:47 AM on September 16, 2016

Thank you for the share!
posted by erattacorrige at 9:54 AM on September 16, 2016

This awesome piece by Pavel Tchelitchew has been in and out of rotation over the years. It was gone for a while then reappeared about 8-10 years ago and I happened to see it. I asked a worker about it and she said it had a reputation for attracting a certain type of (stoned or psychedelically tripping) crowd, and seemed to imply that they removed it from time to time when the stoners would start to congregate too heavily around it. It's something to behold, you can stare at it for hours and see new layers.
posted by Liquidwolf at 10:36 AM on September 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

More Max Ernst! The internet just got bigger.
posted by kozad at 2:01 PM on September 16, 2016

I am getting nothing but a scrambled mess, at both the main link and subsidiary links, and no images at all, simply broken links to them.

Chrome, etc etc etc

Anyone else?
posted by adam hominem at 6:44 PM on September 16, 2016

Anyone else?
Yes, me :(
Firefox + Ghostery with trackers blocked.
posted by valetta at 7:25 PM on September 16, 2016

Nice to know I'm not alone anyway.

Maybe the site is undergoing maintenance or something. I almost do think it's them--I tried IE and it didn't work there either.
posted by adam hominem at 7:28 PM on September 16, 2016

Images are all broken in Chrome and Firefox at the moment.
posted by rmmcclay at 7:42 PM on September 16, 2016

Not working on Safari either.
posted by boilermonster at 10:46 PM on September 16, 2016

Thanks for posting this!
posted by harriet vane at 1:23 AM on September 18, 2016

I have been losing my shit reading all these old catalogs at night. This one Information (1970) may be my favorite so far.
posted by jessamyn at 7:09 AM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]