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New Museum

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10 Inspired New York Museum and Restaurant Pairings

By Adee Braun on

There are over 100 museums in New York City and a staggering 24,000 restaurants. Yet how often have you found yourself wandering around after some quality cultural time looking for a decent place to eat? Even in the more culinarily blessed parts of town, finding a spot for a late lunch after a long day of viewing art can be daunting. Your brain is fried from all the contemplating over the profound creativity of man. Lunch is so quotidian. But life should not be so difficult. The least we can do here at Flavorwire is help you find some post-art eats. Ergo, we present you with museum and restaurant pairings to make your next museum visit a little more convenient and a lot more delicious. … Read More

Art

A Movie-Drome, Kafka’s Execution Device, and Other ‘Ghosts In the Machine’

By Marina Galperina on

The new exhibit at the New Museum might leave you glaring suspiciously at your toaster or wanting to give your computer a big, sensual hug. It all depends on how you take it. There are over 70 artists and visionaries representing 50 years of our relationship with technology at the Ghosts In The Machine exhibit, filling three floors. Are you comfortable with the machines taking on progressively more human traits and healing, killing, imitating, and infiltrating your psyche? Check out our slideshow preview and see. … Read More

Art

New Museum’s ‘The Ungovernables’: A Triennial for the 99%

By Judy Berman on

New Museum’s second triennial, The Ungovernables, which opened this week in Manhattan, comes saddled with an unfair amount of baggage. First and foremost, it’s about to go head-to-head with Whitney Biennial 2012 — and the exhibitions’ similar missions (to collect the past few years’ best new art) and timing (the biennial debuts March 1st) will make it difficult for the New York art press to resist comparing them.

Then there’s the intense criticism New Museum has often faced in the four years since it moved to its big, beautiful Bowery home. While 2010′s Jeff Koons-curated tour of trustee Dakis Joannou’s personal collection drew both conflict-of-interest controversy and accusations that the museum was celebrating ostentatious, tasteless wealth, New York magazine’s influential art critic Jerry Saltz responded to last fall’s Carsten Höller slide-and-carousel show with fiery invective about the transformation of museums into playgrounds. And although it did earn some positive reviews, The New York Times called the institution’s first triennial, 2009′s Younger Than Jesus, “familiar, like a more-substantial-than-average version of a weekend gallery hop in Chelsea and the Lower East Side, right down to the token Asian and African imports.” … Read More

Art

Visiting the New Museum Will Now Cost You More

By Caroline Stanley on

Experience, Carsten Höller’s current exhibition at the New Museum has been one of the fall’s most popular shows, in large part because it includes a 102-foot slide that visitors can zoom down, a sensory deprivation tank, and a mirrored carousel. As New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz recently explained in a piece about… Read More

Art

Pic of the Day: Carsten Höller’s Slide in the New Museum

By Alison Nastasi on

Belgian artist Carsten Höller’s metal slide installations often boggle the mind. How does he manage to burrow through buildings to put them into place? The spiral-shaped slides have been an ongoing project for Höller since the ’90s when he created a similar series that featured at the Berlin Biennale, and later at the offices of… Read More

Daily Dose

Daily Dose Pick: George Condo

By Paul Laster on

Notorious for his banned cover art to Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, George Condo is a wild, prolific painter with a masterful eye for the grotesque.

Employing a twisted, kitsch vision of comic and tragic muses, Condo paints powerful, psychological portraits, based on memories of old-master paintings and keen observations of everyday people. Working in a style that he has dubbed “artificial realism,” Condo turns the world around us into a surreal playground for the bizarre. … Read More

Art

Kanye West Wanted His Album Banned

By Caroline Stanley on

Some interesting, albeit not really surprising, news: According to Calvin Tomkins’ profile of George Condo in this week’s New Yorker, Kanye West wanted the cover art for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to get his album banned — because he wanted more publicity. From the feature:

“West came to Condo’s studio, where for several hours they listened to tapes of his music, and over the next few days Condo made eight or nine paintings. Two of them were portraits of West, one in extreme closeup, with mismatched eyes and four sets of teeth. Another showed his head, crowned and decapitated, placed sideways on a white slab, impaled by a sword. There was also a painting of a dyspeptic ballerina in a black tutu, a painting of the crown and the sword by themselves in a grassy landscape, and a lurid scene of a naked black man on a bed, straddled by a naked white female creature with fearsome features, wings, no arms, and a long, spotted tail. West chose that one.”

Condo’s mid-career survey exhibition, which will feature more than eighty paintings and sculptures, opens at the New Museum on January 26th. Let us know if you think any of his Kanye-commissioned covers (which are pictured after the jump, with commentary from Condo) should make the cut. … Read More

Daily Dose

Daily Dose Pick: Rhizome

By Paul Laster on

The go-to site for technological experimentation, Rhizome offers a riveting array of new-media art, networked culture, and creative internet information.

Founded way back in 1996 to support a developing community of digital-art pioneers, the savvy site now boasts more than 2,500 avant-garde works in the ArtBase, its online archive. Affiliated with the New Museum since 2003, Rhizome also publishes a dynamic blog, commissions emerging artists to create new-media projects, organizes exhibitions and events, and provides a powerful platform for the discussion and promotion of experimental art. … Read More

Art

New Museum’s New Look: “Hell, Yes” vs: “Rose II”

By Caroline Stanley on

A few weeks back we heard that Ugo Rondinone’s Hell, Yes rainbow sculpture, which has adorned the facade of the New Museum since the building opened in 2007, was going to be replaced by Isa Genzken’s Rose II. Rondinone’s piece, which was originally loaned to the NuMu for a two-year exhibition, has become emblematic for most of us — like an unofficial, wacky logo for the organization. In fact, it was purchased for the museum by trustees in June 2009. Note: In case you were worried, the museum has promised that it will reinstall Hell, Yes in another location soon. Maybe a nice farm upstate, where there are other unwanted sculptures he can play with. … Read More

Art

New Museum Wants to Hear About Your First Love

By Caroline Stanley on

As part of A Day Like Any Other, a mid-career survey of Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander that opens today at the New Museum, she has installed a police sketch artist on the third floor to sit with visitors, listen to a description of their “first love,” and draw portraits that will hang on the… Read More