met
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.
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.”
__==__==__==__==__==
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.
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.
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!
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.â€
A South American Getaway in the Met! As always, there’s more inside.
The End of Capitalism; Damien Hirst is some Bullshit
Damien Hirst and Murakami need an ass kicking. Conflating consumerism with high art was funny and original when Warhol did it, guys. But 50 years have passed, and Warhol’s been inducted into the canon. So that just makes you greedy, derivative profiteers. Hirst, for example, sold his diamond encrusted one-liner for $100 million, then sued a 16-year-old who was making bootleg collages of his work. Because, you know, it’s a self-conscious meta-criticism. 
“But at least we’re talking about art,†apologists will cry. “Isn’t that the point?†No, no it’s not.
–
We didn’t sleep well last night, and we’re taking it out on capitalism! Read on.
