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Posts tagged as:

the metropolitan museum of art

The Met Does Punk, Bleached and Ironed

by Paddy Johnson on May 22, 2013
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Critics mostly agree that the Punk show at The Met isn’t very good. I’m not a different voice in this choir, but perhaps my tenor might offer a slightly different pitch. This week at The L Magazine I explain why the Met Museum’s “Punk: From Chaos to Couture” fails.

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Art F City at The L Magazine: Should the Met Museum Charge Admission Fees?

by Paddy Johnson on April 1, 2013
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I’m heading off to CUNY tonight to talk to Brian Lehrer about the rising admission costs of museums as well as the recent lawsuit filed against The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In preparation for the discussion, I penned this column for The L Magazine fleshing out a few of my thoughts on the matter. And because I never say so explicitly in the piece, let me make it clear here, that I think the lawsuit is frivolous. Those looking to hear me speak more on the matter can watch the TV spot Wednesday at 7:30 pm, Thursday at 2am, Saturday at 10am and Sunday at 11pm. In the meantime, an excerpt from my column.

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Met Members Realize the Met Is Free; Lawsuit Ensues

by Whitney Kimball on November 20, 2012
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A couple of members at the Metropolitan Museum of Art discovered that the Met is admission-free, and now they want reparations. Longtime members Theodore Grunewald and Patricia Nicholson have filed suit on the grounds that the vast majority of visitors were likewise unaware that the museum is admission-optional.

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Art Fag City at The L Magazine: History’s Fakest Photos

by Will Brand on November 7, 2012
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Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop, now up at the Met, has obvious appeal. It’s the first major exhibition to examine manipulated photography, and manipulated photography—and learning to spot it—is fascinating to anyone with a pulse. To be honest, I didn’t think the exhibition could possibly come through on the promise of the topic. Curator Mia Fineman, though, has created an exhibition that manages to give a comprehensive history of manipulation, cast doubt over photography’s potential for authenticity, and provoke and reward close looking. You should go, and you should bring your mom, because she’ll get it too.

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Art Fag City at The L Magazine: Regarding Regarding Warhol: It Sucks!

by Paddy Johnson on October 25, 2012
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What’s better for cocktail party conversation: a trip to the The Metropolitan Museum to see the exhibition or a trip to a couple out-of-the-way shows you might actually like? I did both recently; this week, we’ll focus on the Met—because high-profile flops are generally great for party chatter.

Aside from The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl, basically every critic in the city has panned Regarding Warhol. That’s for good reason. Curators Mark Rosenthal, Marla Prather, Ian Alteveer, and Rebecca Lowery have assembled a conceptually empty show around the idea that Warhol has influenced the art world’s biggest stars—especially the long list of them included in this show.

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#Longreads: The Surprisingly Old Art of Photo Fakery

by Paddy Johnson on October 19, 2012
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“You can do anything in photography if you can get away with it.” wrote Paul Strand, a photographer who in 1915, painted out a figure that cluttered the composition of “City Hall Park.” That quote appears somewhere in the middle of Dushko Petrovich’s essay on the history of digital photography, and I love it. It speaks to the philosophy that the quality of the image should dictate its form, which even in the context of image manipulation, is its own kind of artistic purity

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Who likes Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years at the Met?

by Leighann Morris on September 24, 2012
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Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and boy, have critics had a field day, almost universally panning it. With almost 50 works by Warhol and nearly 100 works by artists who have responded to Warhol in some way, the show was bound to cause a stir because really, which artist hasn’t been influenced by Andy Warhol? With this in mind, critics ask: is Regarding Warhol an intelligently curated retrospective that explores important aspects of Warhol’s work, or is Regarding Warhol a celebrity driven, gimmicky attendance boost?

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Amid the Art Fair Rush: “Expanding Museums” at Frieze Talks

by Corinna Kirsch on May 5, 2012
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Boy, was I wrong about what to expect from “Expanding Museums.” The panel, one of the Frieze Talk series of roundtable discussions and lectures held in conjunction with the Frieze art fair, should have been a rare opportunity to see the heads of New York museums chatting about “the current and future roles of contemporary art institutions.” Former New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff led the panelists, which included Glenn Lowry, Director of MoMA, Adam D. Weinberg, Director of the Whitney, and Sheena Wagstaff, Chairman of the Modern and Contemporary Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum.

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Monday Links! Ilness, Wealth, and Reversals of Fortune

by Reid Singer on December 19, 2011
  • Kim Jong-il, the character treated to a stunningly accurate portrayal in Team America: World Police, has died. The sexagenarian  was best remembered for his height, his fondness for looking at things, and the threat he posed to global security. [NYT]
  • Street art blogger RJ Rushmore has published a compilation of photographs from ABMB. Our hats are off to Mr. Rushmore for bringing some street art to the fore that we don’t absolutely hate. [Vandalog]
  •  The Metropolitan Museum of Art has extended a hand to Google Goggles, The Shazam of the visual world. Visitors carrying a mobile device can now point it at thousands of objects in the Met’s collection and gain access to the wealth of information available about the work online. [Bloginity]
  • Collectors buy art for “emotional value” at the same rate that men read Playboy “for the articles.” This, at least, was the assumption among art investment firms that has been very much rebuked by a new study published by Deloitte Luxembourg. For their part, art speculators are more active and powerful than they used to be, and will likely contribute to an increase in trading that could potentially drive prices up and out of the reach of museums. [Real Clear Arts]
  • So yeah, you might be wondering if museums are depending too much on private donors. Are the bad guys really winning? Today, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Opera House and the Tate announced plans to renew their sponsorship deals with British Petroleum through 2017. Citing the “extraordinary” support of the oil company, the institutions made their move in the face of severe criticism from environmental groups, including a molasses-spilling ceremony conducted by protestors last spring. [Guardian]
  • While it may be old news by blog standards, AFC wishes to pay our respects to John C. Wessel, the New York art dealer who died on Friday. The St Louis native will be remembered as one of the first and most strident supporters of LGBT artists, offerring solo exhibitions to Mike Bidlo, Walter Robinson, Donald Moffett, Rhonda Zwillinger and George Platt Lynes in the ’80s and ’90s. [Gallerist NY]
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Massive Links! Censorship Showdown | NEA Throw-Down | DC Has a Warhol Ho-down

by Reid Singer on September 15, 2011
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The National Endowment for the Arts launches an ambitious new initiative. The Met raked it in for New York this summer. A beneficiary of copyright laws applauds efforts to undermine them. Andy Warhol’s eminent star quality remains high, unexplained.

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