The structure, which will connect to the museum’s Sanaa-designed building, will double the museum’s footprint on the Bowery, providing an additional 50,000 square feet for galleries, improved public circulation, and flexible space for the institution’s more experimental programs like its business incubator and the urban-policy think tank that it runs.
Author: Douglas McLennan
In Praise Of The Grid As A Tool Of Creativity
“The grid is ripe ground for tilting, warping, ripping, and otherwise distorting into new forms. As autumn and the back-to-school season get underway, it’s only natural to crave order. But a crisp gridded notebook needn’t be a way to restrain our thinking or reign in our imaginations. As Jefferson and other architects have long known, the grid is simply an underlying structure—upon which we may be able to build something new.”
Have Our Senses Been Polluted?
“I don’t mean to depict our sensorium — the entire range and capacity of our sensory experience — as a pure state that has been defiled by light, noise, flavor and scent pollution; that would just be another version of the original-sin-and-fall narrative. I would argue rather that we have managed to turn the senses against themselves by pitting overwhelming light against lights, overpowering sound against sounds, intense flavor against flavors, penetrating aroma against aromas. In each case, the result is a marked simplification in the field of possible experiences — one or two stimuli will outshine, outsmell or outshout the rest.”
Michael Friedman Was A Brilliant Talent. So Why Did He Die?
Mr. Friedman’s death from complications of H.I.V./AIDS has rattled the theater world, both because he was seen as among the brightest lights of his generation and because it shocked those who had come to see H.I.V. infection as a chronic but manageable condition, at least for those with health care.
Artist Graffiti’s Jeff Koons Work – In Augmented Reality
It’s a protest. And graffiti artist Sebastian Errazuriz didn’t physically deface one of Koons’ famous balloon dogs. But the augmented reality graffiti is Errazuriz’s way of staking a claim to public space. He doesn’t think the privilege of geo-tagging should necessarily fall to technology giants. After Snapchat announced a partnership with the sculptor Jeff Koons that uses augmented reality to place his artworks into famous landmarks around the world, Mr. Errazuriz “graffiti-bombed” the project.
A “Phantom Of The Opera Sequel – But It’s On A Tour That Critics Aren’t Supposed To Review?
“This is a new wrinkle in the very old book of showdowns between producers and critics. It’s one thing to have a preview period for performers and stagehands to settle in; previews even used to be significantly discounted, a good-faith concession from producers to fans as shows found their footing. But using an entire tour stop as a critic-free preview zone? That’s not how out-of-town tryouts or tours run. Eventually reviewers report.”
Consciousness – What’s Real And What’s Not (And That’s Difficult To Determine)
“We live in a time when scientists seem to like nothing better than to expose our everyday view of reality as delusional. They say, “You see the color red, but in fact, out there are only atoms; there are no colors. You hear music, but out there, there are no sounds,” etc. This gives them the authority to describe an entirely different reality, in which deciding between chocolate or strawberry ice cream, say, is nothing more than a matter of warring cohorts of neurons transferring their electrical charges and chemical processes this way and that, while outside your brain there is only a flavorless world of atomic particles. It’s a vision that denies not only our existence—as people choosing between ice-cream flavors—but also the existence of the things we experience.”
The Leonardo We Need Him To Be: Walter Isaacson’s New Bio Frames The Artist/Thinker For Contemporary Culture
“Our deepest sense of this most famous artist remains subject to change. The systematic publication of the notebooks, beginning in the late nineteenth century, tipped our understanding of his goals from art toward science, and opened questions about how to square the legendary peacefulness of his nature with his designs for ingeniously murderous war machines.”
Alex Ross: New York’s Two Biggest Musical Organizations Open Their Seasons In Predictable, Traditional Fashion
The Metropolitan Opera opened the season with its hundred-and-fifty-seventh performance of Bellini’s “Norma.” The New York Philharmonic began with its hundred-and-nineteenth rendition of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. This is the safe course that many performing-arts groups are choosing in precarious times: the eternal return to the world that was. Both works are masterpieces that deserve to be heard repeatedly. Yet the implicit message is reactionary. As the nation contends with its racist and misogynist demons, New York’s leading musical institutions give us canonical pieces by white males, conducted by white males, directed by white males.
Wall Street Firm That Paid To Erect “Fearless Girl” Sculpture Is Fined For Underpaying Women Employees
Ironic? The company had called on Wall Street companies to put more women in leadership roles when it erected the sculpture. After complaints about underpaying women, the company will pay $5 million to more than 300 women, following a U.S. Department of Labor audit that uncovered the alleged discrepancies, according to a settlement agreement.