Have you ever noticed how most people’s photos from visits to places like the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Fall are interchangeable? Corinne Vionnet’s series Photo Opportunities has taken that idea and flipped it on its head to make something entirely new. The Swiss photographer layered between 200 to 300 tourist-taken shots of some of the world’s most famous landmarks to create what look like blurry, Impressionist paintings. “This work is intrinsically linked to the people who took these pictures,” Vionnet has explained. “The collaboration is obvious, but it is without their knowledge. These pictures are on the Internet, to be seen by any eventual visitors. I am just one of those visitors. It is the sheer quantity of these almost identical pictures that gave me the idea of superimposing them. I do not think I would have had the idea if I had made all these pictures of the same places myself. Anyway, the work would lose its meaning.” Click through to check out a gallery of images.
On a recent visit to a handful of Paris museums, French artist Leo Caillard realized how much people treat the experience like flipping through pictures on a mobile phone. “We see thousands of different pictures every day in news, art, fashion, internet ads, Facebook,” he told Wired. “Everything is together without any organization. People start to lose the ability to reflect on what they are looking at.” This idea inspired Art Games, his series of digitally rendered images of people playing with works of art that have been “enhanced” with navigation elements from iTunes, iOS, and Mac OS X. Click through to check out more.
From blueprints to renderings, budget restraints to breaking ground, the architectural review process is slow-moving beast. (Just consider the Second Avenue subway punchline.) So imagine our excitement over the highly anticipated May opening of the Pompidou-Metz after a scant three-year delay. The high profile of the museum means that Metz will have the chance to reinvent itself from a town of industry in northeastern France into a full-blown arts hub.
The idea of the expanding museum brand is nothing new — we’ve seen it thanks to franchises like the Guggenheim and the Tate, while Whitney and Louvre offspring wait in the proverbial wings. So what we can expect from the newest outpost of France’s most venerable contemporary art institution? A sneak peek at Pompidou-Metz after the jump.
What is a 650,000 square-foot, 217-year-old cultural institution doing beating up on a toddler? The toddler in question would be Pinacothèque, an art upstart that’s managed to steal Parisian attention and attendance in its two years as a commercial exhibition space, and the bane of the Louvre Museum’s current existence. Not that the Palais du Louvre has been branché for locals since Manet protested the academic Salon, but if there is one thing the biggest museum in Paris doesn’t like, it’s a stolen tourist population. So how in the world is Pinacothèque drawing 70,000 more monthly visitors than the granddaddy of French cultural institutions? Quelle horreur!
Numerous cities hold photography fairs and festivals, but none do it as well as the City of Light. Back for its 13th edition, Paris Photo takes over the Carrousel du Louvre to present 19th-century, modern, and contemporary photography by 102 exhibitors, including 89 galleries and 13 publishers from 23 countries. With special exhibitions of Arab and Iranian photography, the BMW Prize for the best artist represented by a gallery at the fair, and a spotlight on young talent, Paris Photo offers the opportunity to explore a common history and photography now.
According to the press release that accompanied this image, Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan was inspecting a prototype of the dome for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which is expected to open in 2013. Jean Nouvel, Pritzker Prize-winning architect for the project, smiles to his left. Give us your best caption. Our favorite response will win a copy of Photo:Box, a collection of 250 photographs by 200 of the world’s most prominent photographers.
With a decent amount of fanfare, we learned this week that the Louvre – all 653,000 square feet of it – will henceforth catalog 98 percent of the pieces in the permanent collection online, in English. Quelle horreur! The database, called Atlas, launched today so we did the dirty work for you. Here’s what’s what. Read More »
1. “A controversial branch of the Louvre museum which rights activists say is being built by exploited Asian labor will promote ‘universalism’ and a new multi-cultural harmony, French curators say.” Hmm… [via Reuters]
2. Hope you’re not eating breakfast: Because some big-mouthed assistant stylist has an ax to grind (at least that’s our guess), Page Six reports that Britney Spears menstruated on a bunch of couture at a recent Elle Magazine shoot. [via NYP]
3. Was The Real Housewives of New Jersey‘s Danielle Staub a coke whore in the ’80s?! (She’s the one who looks like Skeletor and had phone sex with a dude for two years without ever meeting him.) And did producers know? [via Gawker]
4. Underwear with an image that resembles Hitler but was really inspired by Lenin are being removed from London stores. [via The Telegraph]
5. Susan Boyle (or “SuBo” as the tabloids call her) cracked under the pressure of insta-fame and dropped some f-bombs in front of a crowd yesterday; she’s still the favorite to win Saturday’s finale of Britain’s Got Talent. [Via The Sun]
About a month back, we posted the first page of Pictures at an Exhibition, by Sara Houghteling, a history lesson in the form of a novel. Houghteling drew inspiration from the autobiography of Rose Valland, who played an instrumental role in the protection and recovery of some of France’s great works of art when Nazis plundered the museums and galleries of Paris in World War II. After the jump, Houghteling talks with us about her research, and the true stories from which her fiction is constructed.
I heart NY State: The I LOVE NY logo that has persisted on souvenir T-shirts for 31 years is being updated! NEW YORK STATE TOURISM decided that the original MILTON GLASER logo was too narrow — the three stolid letters and iconic heart represented only the excitement of New York City, not the state as a whole. So in order to lure tourists beyond Times Square, the logo now appears covered in snow or with small animals perched near it. The tourism office hopes the range of designs will make tourists realize that New York is somehow an entire state and not just a city. [TTG]
Terence Koh’s sexy Jesus still rocking Christians across the pond…
