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.

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.

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.

sorry for the troubles, we will be back

this memorial day, remember that we’ll be blogging again soon, we promise!

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.

‘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!

Medieval Treasury

These scenes (and others, like the stations of the cross) are fascinating precisely because their content is so regimented. The Gospel says that Christ was nailed to a cross, so he has to have stigmata. He was stabbed with a lance, so he has to have a slit in his ribcage. His mother was there, so she has to be seen reacting to her dead son. Etcetera.
More inside.

The Jan Mitchell Treasury

Well. We failed. As we approached her, we were overtaken by the memory of the first time we’d ever asked a girl to slow dance in sixth grade. K— M——- (who we still have a crush on and would marry if the chance arose) rolled her eyes, sighed loudly and said, “fine” in the same tone of voice usually reserved for words like “treason” or “staff infection.”

A South American Getaway in the Met! As always, there’s more inside.

reanimator

Thanks to Suzanne from Public Historian who pointed us to Arthur Ganson, who’s got a ton of crazy weird machines for view on youtube, not to mention in the MIT Museum.

Jansen Addendum

And here is a video:

STRANDBEESTEN from Alexander Schlichter on Vimeo.

Pretty Art Robots

Jansen, who comes off as a mad scientist with a hint of a god complex, has been developing (“evolving”) these things for almost twenty years, and his labor is evident in the creatures’ graceful movement. Most are made from PVC, but one particularly striking Strandbeest is made from 3.2 tons of what looks to be Corten steel. It’s so perfectly engineered that a single person can push it around, its many lumbering metal legs attached to an axis that somehow lets a person move forty times his body weight.

More inside.