Josiah Tell
Crème de Menthe and Armor: The Josiah Tell Interview
In a Suggested Donation exclusive interview, noted art historian Josiah Tell goes on the record about Prince, gun control, and witchcraft! Read the full interview inside, but leave your inhibitions at the door. Because if you bring them inside they will die of fright.
My Roommate’s Camera is a Racist
This week on At the Met, we look at the Beneson Gallery of African Art and accuse an inanimate object of bigotry. Read more inside.
Maps!
We love the strangemaps blog, so coming across MAPCO (via the always-excellent Metafilter) really brightened up our Monday.
Rad aerial of Gallipoli inside.
A Reputation for Amorous Predispositions
Nothing gets us going like a blockbuster museum exhibition. The Picasso and Braque show a few years back had us carrying around a stack of books for three months to hide the perpetual boner we’d get thinking about those lovely gray-brown forays into cubism. And don’t even get us started about Leonardo’s
Ginevra de’ Benci at the National Gallery.
This week in At the Met, we look at Vermeer. More inside.
Europeans Can’t Get Enough of That Sweet, Sweet Classicism
In 1854, under pressure from Commodore Matthew Perry, Japan opened its borders to the West for the first time in more than 200 years. The concisely named “International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine” in Philadelphia in 1876 was America’s first World’s Fair, where pavilions from thirty-odd countries—including Japan—exposed 9 million westerners to the wonders of the “Orient.”
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Our room-by-room tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art continues with European decorative arts from 1850-1900. Come on in, the art history’s fine.
Jerk University: The Nicholas Roerich Museum
If you want to engineer buildings or paint or sculpt, fine. But doing all three is just tacky. It says, “I think I’m better than you because I made the statue of David and designed St. Peter’s Basilica and you spent 45 minutes yesterday trying to figure out how to play ‘Smooth Criminal’ on the guitar.” Well, I’m unimpressed by a broad ouvre. As the saying goes, “It doesn’t matter many extracurricular activities you have on your application to Jerk University. It’s still Jerk University, and it’s still a shitty school.”
There’s lots more inside, where we visit the Nicholas Roerich Museum and get in touch with our deep-seeded hatred of polymaths.
Modern Self Portraits
This week on Meet the Met: the Modern Art Mezzanine has an exhibition called The Lens and the Mirror showing self-portraits from the Museum’s own collection.
Come on in for a bit of discussion and a sampling of the works on display.
Ayo Technology
Lauren’s post on the awesome World Digital Library reminded us of another impressive online art collection, Google Earth’s Masterpieces of the Prado. These images weigh in at 14,000 megapixels, meaning you get closer to works by Dürer, Bosch, and Reubens in Google Earth than you would be able to in person. It’s pretty remarkable—you can see brushtrokes and cracks in the oil paint, but never any pixelation. Definitely best viewed in full screen Google Earth mode, but you can also check out some of these massive images in Google Maps.
READ THE SUN
The Rockefeller Hall has a great collection of large-format Art Nouveau advertising posters. As usual, images and a rant after the jump.
More Museum Apps, Please
A Great Emancipator-themed iPhone app, coming to you free courtesy of the Rosenbach Museum in Philly. And an idea for better mobile museum software. More after the jump.
‘Pressions
What we do know is that these paintings are pretty as all get-out and seriously, you should be going to this museum all the fucking time. Someday you’ll have kids and you’ll move to Connecticut and it will be boring as shit and you’ll miss the days when one of the world’s great repositories of cultural history was just a subway ride away, but you blew your chance to be a regular there because you got high or spent time with your girlfriend when you’re missing the goddamn point because you don’t seem to realize that you would enjoy being high in the Jaques and Natasha Gelman Collection, or that you could french your sweetheart upstairs while looking at the fucking Rodins which are the most erotic objects in the universe, Legends of the Fall-era Brad Pitt included. Come on in to get yelled at while learning about painting!
