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 how museums have become playgrounds, “It’s arty junk food.” Unfortunately for those of us who haven’t indulged yet, it turns out that all of that fun comes at a price — a $4 admission hike to be exact.
“Due to unprecedented attendance for the Carsten Höller exhibition and increased staffing needs, we have increased admission prices,” Gabriel Einsohn, a spokeswoman for the New Museum, told NewYorkology. “It is most likely not a permanent increase.” Given that the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum both recently increased their admission prices to a recommended $25 donation, the current $16 rate at the New Museum is hardly the most expensive ticket in town — and if you’re willing to fight the crowds, you can always check out the Höller exhibition for free on Thursday evenings from 7 to 9pm. [via ArtsBeat]
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 Miuccia Prada in Milan. The artist’s works allow viewers a moment of self-exploration, while toying with feelings of panic and glee. Those are things we’d certainly feel rushing down a 102-foot-long slide that winds its way from the New Museum’s fourth floor to its second. Höller’s exhibit will also feature a new light installation, a sensory deprivation pool, and more. Hit the jump to get a peek at slide. Head to Gothamist for more pics and some video. Photo credit: Kohey Kanno
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 walls of the gallery. Cute, huh? (You can sign up with the sketch artist by sending an e-mail to firstlove@newmuseum.org.) And the interactive installation fun doesn’t end there: Neuenschwander will also be collecting visitors’ wishes and the dirt off of their shoes. Intrigued? New Yorkers can catch her discussing her work with Richard Flood in the theater at the New Museum tomorrow night at 7pm.
Hyperallergic correspondent Lisa Radon was on hand yesterday to catch a few choice statements made by New Museum head curator Richard Flood as part of a talk on “Creating Networks” at the Portland Art Museum, a lecture that began with a “sharply traced” viewpoint of the art world vis-a-vis Flood’s own impressive career and ended with a “wildly out-of-touch” conversation about art and the internet.
Radon’s presence at the talk, and her blog post thereafter, are direct contradictions to Flood’s assertion that the internet is a self-mutating chat room with no narrative, history, or scope. And what was the curator’s purpose in revealing that he “just found out about blogs three months ago”? Is it a confusing and convoluted ruse, a plot designed to jumpstart a new discussion in the arts community? Read what else Radon recorded after the jump and judge for yourselves.
Sure, recent media coverage has been dominated by March Madness, but the betting classes of the architecture world were in a tizzy of their own this weekend with the announcement of the 2010 Pritzker Prize. The Pritzker — think March Madness meets the Oscars meets the Super Bowl, but for architects — was founded in 1979 and first bestowed upon Modernist master Philip Johnson. This year’s committee, heavily favored to honor Stephen Holl, instead picked Japanese design duo Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, aka SANAA. Visual primer after the jump.
1. Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, partners in the Japanese architectural firm SANAA, have won the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Among their projects in the U.S. are New York’s New Museum and a glass pavilion for the Toledo Museum of Art. [via NYT]
2. It’s officially a hit: Broadway’s Next to Normal, which took home three Tony awards last year, has earned back its $4 million in invested capital. [via NYT]
3. Blossom (aka Mayim Bialik) has landed a role on The Big Bang Theory as a potential love interest for Sheldon. [via EW]
4. Mark your calendars: MGMT will be the musical guest on Saturday Night Live‘s April 24th episode. [via TwentyFourBit]
5. Is it “groupthink” to tell you that you must watch Erykah Badu strip in her new music video, “Window Seat”? [via Vulture]
