ART edited by Julia Turshen

Found this little gem photocopied and folded while moving things around to fit a gem of a dumpster dive. Wish I could remember where it came from… This is some pre-Batali and Gweneth go to Spain Julia Turshen humor.

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.

Playing hide and seek with Yinka Shonibare

I’ve never quite understood the concept of reassembling historic rooms, putting a red velvet rope around it, and funneling tourists on a counter-intuitive path through a house, castle, or museum. But once Yinka Shonibare placed child figures ducking under desks…

Scienceblogs goes to the creation museum!

God made dirt and dirt don’t hurt, right?
“Their first big exhibit is a perfect example of the principle in action. It’s a model of a dinosaur dig, with two men working away at excavating the bones. There is a video accompanying it in which the two views are presented. The younger Asian fellow in front says, and I paraphrase, “This animal died about a hundred million years ago. Its body dried in the sun for several days before being slowly buried under layers of sediment in a local flood.” Then the avuncular creationist says, “I see the same bones, but I believe this dinosaur was killed suddenly about 4400 years ago in a huge global flood, which buried it deeply all at once.” And then he goes on to explain that see, they have the very same evidence, but he understands it in the light of God’s word.”

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.

Uncommon Economic Indicators: Museum Edition

Brian Lehrer was talkin Museum budget cuts this morning, featuring several guests, including interviews with Laura Urbanelli of the Montclaire Art Museum and Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold Lehman. You can listen to the interview on the site.

Some things we learned:
- Limited exhibition display times (alternate days, mornings only, etc)
- Staff layoffs! (But are the directors taking pay cuts?)
- Four day workweeks, reduced hours
- Everything Must Go: current trend of “De-accessioning” material (aka selling off your collection). There are supposed to be guidelines, that are not always followed: Sell art to buy art, rather than to pay off debt.
- It’s a “Perfect Storm” of museum monetary shittiness
- “voluntary separation agreements” = buy outs

KEEP OFF THE ART

As to be expected of Texas, UT Austin is home to the largest university museum in the country, The Blanton.

This art museum, also known as that big building on the south edge of campus no one’s ever been in, recently re-worked an outdoor sculpture to add a heart warming invitation to interact with the work.

Perhaps this is a move toward embracing the ways of UT’s other, more famous, cultural institution the Harry Ransom Center, home of the fifteen minute training video on how to interact with the materials. Get out your freshly washed hands and book snakes.

Seriously though, does this mean no more drunk coed sing-alongs tangled in the tendrils of public art?

‘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!

BOMB the Borough

Just discovered B.O.M.B. — Brooklyn’s Other Museum of Brooklyn. This glorious fake Museums seems to have a real location on Wallabout street, and a bunch of “artifacts” promoting good local causes, along with other articles of vague historical import or curiosity.

We’re especially curious about the physical space itself, anyone been?

We also learned about the long-gone Wallabout Market, formerly the largest produce market on the East Coast from 1801 to 1939, before it was destroyed and swallowed up by the Navy Yards, never to return.