New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opens Richard Serra’s first drawing retrospective to the public today — and quite the eye-opening, austere exhibition it is for the Met. Serra expands the definition of modern drawing by using drawing as a system of thinking, while focusing on process, gravity, and weight rather than representation and figuration. The radical exhibition, which runs through August 28 and then travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Menil Collection in Houston, features some 50 dynamic drawings — many of them monumental in scale — and a selection of sketchbooks from the past 40 years. We spoke with the artist at the Met to gain a deeper understanding of his groundbreaking work, to get his opinion on why young people prefer figurative work, and to capture his realistic thoughts on TV and the internet.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is gearing up for a major expansion in the form of a new wing to house the collection of GAP founder Donald Fisher. Because hell, why not, the art and architecture press has been bandying about some architecture firm names as possible short list contenders for the project. (Unconfirmed, naturally.) But seeing as how there’s a limited pool for this sort of thing, and even museums in the middle-of-nowhere are snagging starchitects for their renovations, andSFMoMA‘s 1995 building is kind of hideous, we present to you a handicapped guide to the contenders.
Architecture! At its best, visionary, innovative, mold-breaking. At its worst, cheesy, overwrought, and ill-timed. The recent architectural follies of Dubai present a fairly good case for prudence in the building arts: a Marvel superhero-themed park is a questionable expenditure even in boom times; as for the world’s largest LED structure, a new opera house, a revolving “dynamic” tower, and an experimental resort dubbed “The Cloud,” well, it’s beginning to look like Gomorrah in Abu Dhabi. But as we know all too well, the current financial crisis is a global situation, which is why we’ve rated six new developments and their associated levels of what-were-they-thinking-ness. Follow along after the jump.
In a sobering follow-up to last week’s announcement that GAP founder and CEO Donald Fisher would donate his entire contemporary art collection to San Francisco’s modern art museum, Fisher died yesterday at age 81 after a protracted battle with cancer. Creating what SF Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker deems “in the league of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Tate Modern in London,” the Donald and Doris Fisher Collection will contribute over 1,100 pieces from masters of 20th and 2st century painting and sculpture. Read More »
Why do I think of MTV when I see the work of Richard Avedon? Because in his early fashion photographs, Avedon invented pictorial-style-as-branding. It envisions all demeanor as performance and uses movement that meets the camera more than halfway. These qualities reached an unanticipated apex in music videos but made their appearance first in Avedon’s innovative magazine pictures of the late 1940s.
Those feeling inspired by the exhibition should DIY their own Marilyn photograph like Flavorpill’s Adda Birnir did back in December.
