1. Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, partners in the Japanese architectural firm SANAA, have won the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Among their projects in the U.S. are New York’s New Museum and a glass pavilion for the Toledo Museum of Art. [via NYT]
2. It’s officially a hit: Broadway’s Next to Normal, which took home three Tony awards last year, has earned back its $4 million in invested capital. [via NYT]
3. Blossom (aka Mayim Bialik) has landed a role on The Big Bang Theory as a potential love interest for Sheldon. [via EW]
4. Mark your calendars: MGMT will be the musical guest on Saturday Night Live‘s April 24th episode. [via TwentyFourBit]
5. Is it “groupthink” to tell you that you must watch Erykah Badu strip in her new music video, “Window Seat”? [via Vulture]
Even if you haven’t wandered up to 5th Avenue at 89th Street recently, chances are you’ve heard whispers of something unusual afoot. That something is courtesy of performance artist Tino Sehgal, whose ephemeral pieces rely on empty space and spectator involvement. One such piece in his current solo show at the Guggenheim, titled “The Kiss,” involves a couple embracing on the floor of the rotunda in a “changing, slow-motion, amorous” entanglement. We at Flavorpill love staging elaborate photo shoots in museums and decided to reinterpret Sehgal’s performance piece in five New York City art institutions: The Metropolitan Museum, New Museum, Rubin Museum, P.S.1, and the Brooklyn Museum. Could we choreograph the same magic?
It seems just yesterday that the New Museum unveiled its first triennial, a survey exhibition titled “Younger Than Jesus” that was accused of being by turns “awfully sedate” and “low-budget bubbly fun,” and the museum itself described as “nothing more than a giant Xbox.” Helmed by a triumvirate of NewMu curators (as critic Jerry Saltz pointed out, “a Millennial, Gen-Xer, and Boomer, respectively”) the group show highlighted work from the wunderkind set, age 33 and younger. Now we’re hearing that the next triennial, not until 2012, will be curated by the museum’s own Eungie Joo, curator of public programs and education since 2007. That name rings a bell…
What do Ellis Island and abandoned buildings have in common with sleeping, drawing, and cross-dressing? In the case of performance artist Nikhil Chopra, moonlighting as a Victorian draftsman named Yog Raj Chitrakar for a project at the New Museum, documenting the history of old places becomes a ritualistic spectacle when partnered with a peek into the artist’s everyday routine. (Bonus: this exhibition has nothing to do with Dakis Joannou and donor-relatedNuMucatfights.) Combining “self-portraiture, autobiography, history, fantasy, and sexuality,” Chopra as Yog Raj is visiting New York landmarks throughout November in the process of creating large-scale charcoal drawings that form a panoramic view of a city in flux. Follow along on his journey with our exclusive behind-the-scenes image gallery, after the jump.
Artist and provocateur William Powhida — who once predicted the post-boom odds of fellow contemporaries like Dash Snow — has issued a challenge to the New Museum on Bowery in his latest piece, which graces the cover of this month’s Brooklyn Rail. As an emerging artist in New York, Powhida’s satires of the art world cognoscenti hit close to home, and the skewering of the only museum in town that tries to cater to young artists and patrons is gutsy, to say the least. His drawing “How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality” depicts all the usual suspects, from Jeff Koons and critics Paddy Johnson and Tyler Green to museum director Lisa Phillips and curator Massimiliano Gioni. Urs Fischer, whose one-man show currently occupies floors two through four, is referenced as well, though we beg to differ that his exhibition “Margeurite de Ponty” is contributing to the NuMu’s so-called “self-injury.” See why, after the jump.
Dean Spunt and Randy Randall jump-started No Age in 2007 with five EPs on five labels. These fed Weirdo Rippers, their first full-length release. At just over 30 minutes, in many respects the album may well have been just another EP, but critical acclaim suggested it was something more. It played as a succinct introduction, a primer to the LA drums-and-guitar duo who these days, we can’t get stop hearing about. Read More »
Jeff Koons is heading to the New Museum, but it’s not what you might think. Trying his hand as curator, Koons has agreed to organize an exhibition of his friend, Greek industrialist Dakis Joannou’s contemporary art collection. The exhibition will run as a part of a series of shows called “The Imaginary Museum,” Joannou’s being the first of several private contemporary art collections displayed publicly in the entire museum. Read More »
Designers of New York’s New Museum, SANAA have captivated London with their sleek, organic Serpentine Pavilion.
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa started the firm in 1995, but it’s their minimalist projects of the past decade that have brought them international acclaim. From the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan to the Zollverein School in Germany, their buildings reveal an abstract approach to the investigation of space. Read More »
On Friday night the New Museum and n + 1 bring you The ’90s vs. the ’90s, a panel talk that will include Michael Azerrad, Mark Greif, Emily Gould, A.S. Hamrah, Marisa Meltzer, and Aaron Lake Smith, and will examine the legacy of the decade’s pop culture touchstones — from the “Dirty Boots” video to Kurt Cobain’s suicide note to those Tickle Me Elmo dolls — on who we are today. After the jump we talk to Aaron, whose popular fanzines Big Hands have been called “an ongoing treatise on disappointment,” about the ubiquitous obsession with Generation X, the WTO riots in Seattle, and the blue hair he rocked back in high school. Read More »
Given that New York’s New Museum pursues an aggressively contemporary agenda, it surprised us to learn that the feisty institution has been keeping an eye on the past. This backward glance is known as the Bowery Artist Tribute, an ongoing project that seeks to record the oral histories of the neighborhood’s former and current resident artists. We spoke with project coordinator Ethan Swan about the BAT, the new New Museum, and the neighborhood’s legacy of both creativity and squalor.
