DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

☆ 700 Paintings, 45 Galleries: A Guide to the Met’s New European Wing
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-24 | by ( Jason Farago | More About Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Five years after the Metropolitan Museum of Art set off on a major renovation of its galleries for European painting, the super-prime real estate at the top of its grand staircase is open again. Down in the galleries, the Met’s designers have widened the rooms, rearranged the sightlines, shellacked the walls purple and blue. The curators have reassembled the whole painting collection for the first time since 2018, shuffled across 45 new galleries and bathed in beautifully tempered light. (When it comes to light, this New Amsterdam institution definitely leans more Dutch than Italian.) Duccio’s break-the-bank Madonna and Child, painted in Tuscany around 1300, now shares a case with Ingres’s painting of the same subject from 1852.

Persons: Beyer Blinder Belle, Truman, Bacon, Beckmann, Kerry James Marshall, You’ll Organizations: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Met Locations: New Amsterdam, Italy, France, Spain, zigzags, Tuscany

The upheaval at Documenta is just one example of how Europe’s art world is being torn by debates about Israel and Gaza, as some institutions have moved to postpone the shows of artists who have criticized Israel. Documenta was initially staged in 1955 as the first large-scale exhibition in West Germany of the art of the European avant-garde. It was a direct response to the Degenerate Art Show, the denunciatory exhibition of modern art staged by the Nazis in Munich in 1937. Although the mural was taken down, it set off a monthslong debate in Germany’s art world about antisemitism, Palestinian activism and Germany’s relationship to formerly colonized countries. Hoskote said Documenta was one of the art world’s greatest events, partly because it had always been a forum for new ideas.

Persons: Documenta’s, — Simon Njami, Gong Yan, Kathrin, Inés Rodríguez, —, ”, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Ranjit Hoskote, Anaïs Duplan, Ai Weiwei, ” Ai, Ai, Galerie Max Hetzler, Lisson’s, Claudia Roth, Documenta, Hoskote Organizations: Venice Biennale, Folkwang, Israel, Art Newspaper, Galerie Max, Berlin, Die Locations: Israel, Kassel, Germany, Gaza, Venice, India, Essen, Haitian, United States, B.D.S, London, Lisson, New York, Paris, West Germany, Munich, Nazi, Indonesia

☆ War Hasn’t Stopped the Kyiv Biennial. It’s Multiplied It.
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-03 | by ( Jason Farago | More About Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Like so many good things about Ukrainian culture, the Kyiv Biennial was born out of the Maidan Revolution, the 2014 democratic uprising that ousted the country’s Kremlin-backed president. Maidan ushered in a nationwide cultural renewal, and Kyiv enjoyed an explosion of activity in art, fashion and, especially, electronic music. That decolonial approach to the Soviet past has taken on profound new importance during the full-scale war. As Russia continues its direct assault on Ukrainian cultural heritage, Ukrainian authorities are ripping down statues and sanding away murals. The 2023 Kyiv Biennial does not want to show its Viennese public a calamity taking place “elsewhere.” It wants to demonstrate that we are all already facing threats to a common democratic future — and it is too late to duck the fight.

Persons: unloved, ” Cherepanyn, Steyerl, Wolfgang Tillmans Organizations: Kyiv Biennial, Kyiv Locations: Crimea, Soviet, Russia, Vienna, Ukraine, Dnipro, biennials

☆ Mark Rothko at Full Scale, and in Half Light
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-25 | by ( Jason Farago | More About Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Melt the world away, lose its details, dissolve its borders; it doesn’t sound like such an unwelcome prospect right now. The most substantial Mark Rothko retrospective in a generation has opened at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and it is a show of monumental dispersion: a pull-out-all-the-stops blockbuster where life passes into vapor. From 1949, when his early figurative pictures finally liquefied into stains of translucent color, Rothko painted with no allusions, no particulars. A lot of people find his large paintings consoling, or seek the Romantic sublime in the depths of his reds and violets. “Behind the color lies the cataclysm,” he said in 1959 — a citation that rarely makes the auction preview catalogs.

Persons: Rothko, Fondation Louis Vuitton, ”, it’s, Frank Gehry Organizations: Fondation, Art Basel, National Gallery of Art, Whitney, Fondation Vuitton, Boulogne Locations: Paris, Washington, New York, Bois

☆ Blaise Cendrars at the Morgan: A Modern Match of Poetry and Painting
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-03 | by ( Jason Farago | More About Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The Big Apple is a good place for reinvention, and the Swiss poet Frédéric-Louis Sauser had reason for a restart here in the spring of 1912. At 25 years old he’d washed up in New York Harbor, nearly penniless after trying his luck in Russia and Brazil. Henceforth he would be called Blaise Cendrars: a name for a poet of fire, a promise of ash (cendres) and art. “Blaise Cendrars: Poetry Is Everything,” at the Morgan Library & Museum, is one of the most appealing and eye-opening shows of the summer — a concentrated pop of free-spirited trans-Atlantic modernity, alive with rich color and typographical pyrotechnics. If you haven’t heard of Cendrars, you’re not alone; in an intro French poetry class you are more likely to encounter his good friend Guillaume Apollinaire, a more polished example of modern alienation and fractured style.

Persons: Frédéric, Louis Sauser, he’d, chucked, Sauser, ”, Blaise Cendrars, “ Blaise Cendrars, you’re, Guillaume Apollinaire Organizations: nickelodeon, First Presbyterian Church, Morgan Library & Museum Locations: Swiss, New York Harbor, Russia, Brazil, Greenwich Village, New York

☆ The Crossed ‘Signals’ of MoMA’s Largest Ever Video Show
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-06 | by ( Jason Farago | More About Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

I sure got my wish with “Signals: How Video Transformed the World,” which closes this weekend at the Museum of Modern Art — and which, screen for screen, hour for hour, stands proud as the most perplexing exhibition of the year. Maybe a dozen times since its opening in March I have ascended to MoMA’s top floor for this ambitious, irregular exhibition of video art, the largest this museum has ever put on. Given the recent subtropical weather here in New York, this final weekend might be ideal for wrestling with “Signals” in MoMA’s climate-controlled galleries. “Signals,” drawn from the museum’s collection by the curators Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo, is decidedly not a history of video art. (Fair enough: Nauman had a major retrospective in these same galleries in 2018, and Jonas has one coming up next year.)

Persons: bafflement, ”, Stuart Comer, Michelle Kuo, Bruce Nauman, Joan Jonas, Nauman, Jonas, Nam, Paik, Orwell Organizations: “, Museum of Modern, I’ve, New Locations: New York, Paris

Search resuls for: "More About Jason Farago"

6 mentions found