Category Archives: art

General arts and culture posts

Met’s “Boyish” New Director

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The retirement of Phillipe de Montebello, former director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, led to the dark horse appointment of Thomas Campbell, right, whom the Economist in a recent interview describes accurately enough as “boyish” at least compared to the patrician Montebello.

In the interview, he seems like a charming and down-to-earth person, and I like that he has a strong background in art history and passion for the arts. The movement to make art more accessible to everyone often means pandering to popular tastes and dumming things down rather than explaining how something came about and why it is remarkable and beautiful. So bravo on that front.

Mr. Campbell apparently does have some some forward-thinking plans, despite the mothballs clinging to him from his forays in the archives. He plans to archive the whole collection of the Met online. Bravo again, and I know just how I would like to see it done.

The collection ought to be archived in the manner of the Rijksmuseum, whose website is a master of its type. The history and details provided about the painting are well-presented, it’s easy to navigate, and the connections it draws between paintings is an art history education in itself. There are my 2 cents, Mr. Campbell.

I hope Mr. Campbell does do well, if only because at a mere 46 years of age, he could have a tenureship as long as Montebello’s as head of the museum.

Adorable Side of Street Art

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Street art is big, it’s all over, from satirical political spraypaint of Obama and Andre the Giant to installations of statues and bits of furniture in unlikely places. Some street art is small. It’s not often you come across the adorable, miniature side of street art, and it makes this project from Little People even more delightful. These Lilliputians would likely get stepped on if left on the streets of London for too long anyway, but I’d love to come across them in New York.

The good people at Little People are doing a charming job by minimizing the scale of street art and infusing their scenes with humor. The photos above are titled “Crappy Christmas.”

The Spread of Gallery Hopping

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It’s snowing outside in Manhattan, which makes one want to curl up with a hot cup of tea rather than trudge outside to galleries. Sure, all I have to do is take the subway, but sometimes that seems like a lot of effort. Nowadays, I don’t have to go far though. Galleries have been mushrooming outside my apartment almost as much as trendy boutiques. The explosion of galleries has been pleasant to watch as a sign of a strong market, yet counter-intuitively it doesn’t mesh with a favorite activity of mine: gallery hopping.

I don’t live in Chelsea, already saturated with galleries, or even some hipster corner of Brooklyn. I live below the Lower East Side and its crazy nightlife, surrounded by Chinese immigrant on one side and Hasidic Jews on the other. I haven’t been able to understand what the Chinese are saying about the galleries popping up with their big installations taking up the entire tiny storefront and the crowds they draw on random nights. I find it…odd.

You’d think I’d be delighted, and I am, but who goes to see these out of the way galleries? The far west 20s of Chelsea still packs galleries like sardines in a can, but the scene has been decentralizing for so long that gallery-hopping in Chelsea is no longer so cool as it once was. Even so, for gallery hopping, Chelsea can’t be beat. I suppose serious art collectors or people who are already fans of the artist would travel to a different area of town, but personally I need some incentive.

Let me explain the premise of gallery hopping: you hook up with a friend or two, you hop from gallery to gallery (thus the necessity of a centralized location), you look at art while drinking free wine and looking at the people. A good time is had by all, even if you don’t see works that you care for. Chelsea still holds major galleries like the Gagosians and Zwirner, but they are more established. For cutting edge galleries, you’ll likely tempted out to Brooklyn. Of course, the quality of art is uneven, but the scene is much better. So Chelsea and Brooklyn for gallery hopping, but my neighborhood? Only recently has it joined the ranks.

The recent proliferation of galleries strikes me as very much a by-product of a inflated art market, a market that is not around to support the tiny art spaces in 2009. On an individual level, this is unfortunate, but on a larger scale seems like a long overdue correction. For my gallery hopping purposes, Chelsea and Brooklyn aren’t going anywhere.