Endorsements (June 21-28)

Hi! Endorsements today:

Today, I submit to you things I like for the week of June 21-28:

• The Boing-Boing endorsed art blog, This isn't Happiness - smartly curated.
• Slate's Culture Gabfest podcast - A weekly gathering of Slate editors. It's funny, it's snobby, it's eclectic (really).
• Fatties on Ice - a podcast co-hosted my staffer, Cynara Geissler. No, she's really my master (I am the student). Cynara and her co-host, Jenny-with-the-best-voice, talk pop culture and media from a feminist, body positive perspective. I like.
  
• Top Chef - Season 7, and it's still good! I like to watch the celebrity chefs make faces when they taste a bad ceviche. If you like this show, then you'll love Max Silvestri's recaps on Eater.com.
• Every Person in New York - A sketch blog so lovely, so simple, it makes you forget how New York feels on most days: crowded and unnerving.
• I've saved the best for last: I just heard "Send Me Some Loving" by Otis Redding on This American Life last week, and I was like, who is this person losing his mind over a woman? You could just hear his desperation, and the liquor, and the sweat in the 20 seconds that they played. Next, I'm on Grooveshark, and now I haven't stopped listening to Ol' Otis for days. Here's a video, I love. Watch the audience get their minds blown.
  

Tove Jansson Carroll and Tokien Covers

Tove Jansson (of Moomin fame) illustrated editions of The Hobbit and Alice in Wonderland. See them all here.




/via the Daily What

Marina Abramović at the MoMa

Performance artist Marina Abramović is all over the Internet so I've just discovered her work though she's been active for more than 30 years. Her work uses the body as a site of violence and a symbol of resilience. Abramović's performances are disturbing and challenging. Just reading her Wikipedia entry makes my stomach uneasy.

Currently, the MoMa is running a retrospective of her work. While Abramović is performing an original piece in the main atrium, other artists are upstairs recreating some of her most famous works.



In "The Artist is Present," Abramović is seated across a table from another chair where museum visitors can sit as long as they like. Some visitors have been brought to tears, while others only stay for a minute. The artist will be performing from opening to close for three months until the end of May.

The MoMa is posting photos online of all the participants on their Flickr stream. The brutally sharp photos are meant to be a documentation of the audience's experience; they say so much about the way we perform with art in a museum space.

He's a Borg

"Ladies and gentlemen, your President is a robot. Or a wax sculpture. Maybe a cardboard cutout. All I know is no human being has a photo smile this amazingly consistent.

"On Wednesday, the Obamas hosted a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, during which they stood for 130 photographs with visiting foreign dignitaries in town for the UN meeting. The President has exactly the same smile in every single shot. See for yourself — the pictures are up on the State Department’s flickr. And, of course, compressed above into 20 seconds for your viewing pleasure."

from Bus Your Own Tray

Hey, cool!

The following map (reblogged from CBC.ca) shows works to be on display as part of the Vancouver Biennale 2009-2011

Instructions: Click on the markers in the map or in the list to the right for more information. Drag the map to look around or zoom in and out to get a closer look.

Weekend Megamix

The Pelican Project



Chat up lines for Web Designers

1. I wish I had an Eyedropper to capture the color of your eyes.

2. Has anybody ever told you that your teeth have perfect kerning?

6. Would you like to lorem ipsum dolor sit on my lap?

9. First I think I’ll stroke your curve, then I’d like to fill you.

11. You look perfectly put together. Do you display this well in IE?

16. Let’s “Skip Intro” and just go find a hotel room right now.

17. When I serve you breakfast in bed tomorrow, would you like your coffee with cream and sugar, or do you prefer it #000000?

I've been doing this my whole life

The project began as a response to the shifting landscape in publishing, and the realization that more and more of us are writing in public, as bloggers and tweeters, for instance. Similarly, we sought to broadcast words in public, through the simple act of contemplative reading on a noisy street corner, or as performance, with readers directly engaging onlookers.

Just Because

Back to the Earth

Toronto street artist PosterChild has an ongoing, extensive project to convert flier and newspaper boxes into guerilla gardening boxes.

via BoingBoing

To Inform and Delight

Here, Milton Glaser-designer of the I ♥ New York logo and co-founder of New York Magazine-speaks at the 1998 TED Conference. This one holds up well.



Further viewing: To Inform and Delight

"The Harvesters" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Thomas Campbell's favourite work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Campbell is the museum's recently appointed director and only the ninth in its 139-year history.

Read more about Campbell in a dishy profile (well, as dishy as pieces get when you're writing about a guy whose passion is 15th century tapestries) by Rebecca Mead in this week's issue of the New Yorker

!!!!

I am absolutely flabbergasted by concept art and character portraits released yesterday from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. Only 269 more sleeps!

Top to Bottom: Alice, Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen of Hearts, Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter.




AND THERE'S MORE! Film stills via USA Today

More Avedon

I've hardly met an Avedon image I didn't like. Here's another... and one I've never seen before!

This sultry portrait of Lauren Hutton (1968) is part of a retrospective of the photographer's fashion work at the International Center of Photography in New York (from May 15 to Sept. 6). Cathy Horyn reviews the exhibit for the New York Times.

Bees always remind me Irving Penn's "Bee on Lips" (1995). There was one buzzing in my room for five days or so, struggling to get out of the space between my blinds and the windows. Today, I captured it in a cup with the help of a wooden sculpture of the Empire State building (as a plank and a nudge in the right direction) and released it outside, where it took flight like the fresh air was a magic tonic.

Accidents Happen (sorry, little guy)

"The Accident" (2008) -- Jeremy Hatch is a ceramicist and sculptor who holds a BFA from Emily Carr Institute and an MFA at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. He has attended residencies and exhibited his work throughout Canada and the United States. Jeremy currently employs a ceramic process of slip-casting porcelain to produce large unglazed sculptural installations. He has expanded his material investigations to incorporate rubber, plastic and fiberglass into his ceramic work. Hatch was the recipient of British Columbia’s 2005 Visual Arts Development Awards.

Take a look at Canadian Design past and present at The Canadian Design Resource

"One thing that Vancouver has been particularly adept at doing is obliterating it's own history."

--Reid Shier, director of Presentation House Gallery, in "Nostalgic poster exhibit revisits Expo 86," Vancouver Courier

Lego on Avedon

via Flickr

Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light

Looking at the work of the late Richard Avedon is a humbling experience. His portraits are the work of an exacting technician, a humanitarian, a true artist, and a cruel, neurotic genius. The 1995 documentary Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light gives comprehensive insight into what a unique visionary he was - and how he was definitely the kind of person you'd want to party with. If you can get your hands on this, it's definitely worth a look.

(FYI, I hear that Bob Mercer screens this doc in the SFU course CMNS 375 Magazine Publishing)

Avedon delivers quote-worthy sound bites here that inspire you to take pictures--or at the very least, look up his work and discover what a great force he was in American photography for more than 50 years. His work extends far beyond the fashion photography and handful or portraits we know him for today.

We've all seen his work, and you probably didn't even know it. If you've ever looked at the liner notes for the Beatles White Album, or 1, then you've seen Avedon's photography. This 2008 post from perpenduum.com looks at the influences of Lartigue and Avedon on the work of Wes Anderson, particularly in The Royal Tenenbaums.

Here's some great trivia facts to take to your next social event involving art or film snobs:

* An Avedon-style photo of actor Owen Wilson, in imitation of Avedon's American West photo of Boyd Fortin holding a disemboweled snake, was used in a prop for the film The Royal Tenenbaums; Wilson's mother Laura Wilson was a close assistant to Avedon.



* This famous (and fantastic) cast photo was taken by Richard Avedon:



A clip from Richard Avedon: Light and Darkness

Family Album

I'm currently doing research on photographer Diane Arbus for my very last undergrad paper (hurrraaay!). Arbus's last project was a Family Album (unfinished), which, among other themes, explored performance and decorum in family photographs and other formal portraits... or at least, that's what art historians think. Who knows what Arbus really had in mind.

There's an unexpected parallel to Arbus's work in a hilarious website I found this weekend. Sexy People is a blog devoted to recovering the "perfect portrait[s]." Like Arbus's work, they reveal the "freak" in all of us--especially those who had their pictures taken before 1990 at a local Sears portrait studio or by Artona.

Thanks, Internet

If I never surface from my room again, it's because I'm on Polyvore, a scrapbooking, styling, fashion watching, DIY, social networking, creative expression extravaganza. You can see what I've done with my day so far in the carousel below.



Find me on Polyvore

Herb and Dorothy

This time of year, you'll find me quite scattered. I'm finding it hard to put together any meaty posts but sometimes when I'm driving home and listening to the radio, I hear something fantastic that I just have to share. Tonight it was the story of Herb and Dorothy Vogel:

Herbert and Dorothy Vogel are an ordinary couple of modest means who managed to build one of the most important contemporary art collections in history. Herb was a postal clerk and Dorothy, a librarian.

"In the early 1960s, when very little attention was paid to Minimalist and Conceptual Art, Herb and Dorothy quietly began purchasing the works of unknown artists. Devoting all of Herb's salary to buy art, and living on Dorothy's paycheck alone, they continued collecting artworks guided by two rules: the piece had to be affordable, and small enough to fit in their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. Within these limitations, they proved themselves curatorial visionaries; most of those they supported and befriended went on to become world-renowned artists. Their circle includes: Sol LeWitt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Tuttle, Chuck Close, Robert and Sylvia Mangold, Lynda Benglis, Pat Steir, Robert Barry, Lucio Pozzi and Lawrence Weiner.

Thirty years on, the Vogels had managed to accumulate over 4,000 pieces, filling every corner of their living space from the bathroom to the kitchen. Their apartment was near collapse, holding way over its limit - something had to be done.

In 1992, the Vogels made headlines that shocked the art world: their entire collection was moved to the National Gallery of Art, the vast majority of it as an outright gift to the institution. Many of the works they acquired at modest prices appreciated so significantly that their collection became worth several million dollars, yet the Vogels never sold a single piece to breakdown the collection.

The Vogels' discerning taste and magnanimity changed the face of contemporary art collecting. In 2007, James Stourton, the chairman of Sotheby's UK, included the Vogels in his acclaimed book, Great Collectors of Our Time: Art Collecting Since 1945. Stourton placed Herb and Dorothy among the top art collectors in the world, alongside Getty, Rockefeller and Mellon."

I want to write more about Herb and Dorothy Vogel because their story is so inspiring. But for now, here's the trailer to a documentary about the Vogels by Megumi Sasaki called Herb and Dorothy.



And of course, some links if you want to read ahead:
* Herb and Dorothy Documentary
* Vogel 50/50 (National Gallery of Art)
* Meet the Vogels (The Moment, NYTimes)

Greed

Last year, Roman Polanski directed Michelle Williams and Natalie Portman in a commercial for a fictional perfume called "Greed", part of a project by Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli. The symbolism in Greed is heavy handed but the humour is right on point.

The exhibit at Rome's Gagosian Gallery features print advertisements and a bottle of the perfume, designed by Miuccia Prada. Dazed and Confused premiered the commercial--full of lush imagery--online yesterday.

Gagosian Gallery
Dazed Digital.com