Category: visual

If we can’t rely on what they say to get a clear sense of how Facebook et al see themselves and the way they are reshaping the world, then what clues do we have? The biggest and most concrete are found not in any online platform, but in their buildings.

“A deeply layered, rigorously controlled formal structure undermined by a strange embarrassing whimsy occurs in almost every painting. While accepted in outlier artists like James Castle, or (more aptly for the 1930s) like Henri Rousseau, it is a quality that mainstream art has tended to eschew, until recently. … This contradictory dynamic of wacky sincerity is recognizable as something that the Midwest surreptitiously instills. … On the one hand, complex formalism conveys gravity, but then is betrayed by an inability to resist slipping a banana peel underfoot.”

The Dunya Contemporary Art Prize, a biennial award which includes a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art and an exhibition with a catalogue as well as $100,000, goes to Sophia Al-Maria, a Qatari-American artist known for coining the term “Gulf Futurism.”

You can’t help noticing the correlation. Of the 238 cities and counties that applied for consideration, plenty have the population (over a million), the pleasant environs and the basic infrastructure Amazon seeks. But if they don’t also have an exceptional art museum — and preferably more than one — those cities didn’t make the cut.

Buildings long deemed passé and unsuccessful can suddenly seem fresh and intriguing to a new generation, just as yesterday’s tacky decorative designs can become tomorrow’s next cool thing. This has been evident in the steady postmillennial flow of monographs on mid-twentieth-century architects who have undergone a downward critical reversal akin to that of Yamasaki—especially Saarinen, Edward Durell Stone, and Paul Rudolph, none of whom now commands the high artistic respect they all enjoyed around 1960.

Jane Rule Burdine: “I could have lived anywhere. I’ve traveled a great bit for work, but I came back to Mississippi because it’s what I know. When I go out hunting for these photographs, it’s not like a stranger coming to town. I can move fluidly. I know what I’m seeing. There’s so much here that I know and can discover within my knowledge. How could I ever exhaust it?”

The Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, frozen in September when the museum decided to deaccession and sell some of its art, represents a tiny fraction of the money that’s coming in from art sales. But, after a bruising fight, the museum wants the money anyway. A state representative says, “These are funds paid for by the residents of the Commonwealth. This is where they belong.”

Aïda Muluneh brought East Africa’s first (and still only) international photography exhibition into being, but she’s doing more than that with her color-saturated studio images. “This place has so much complexity, and I’m witness to that complexity. There are so many subcultures, there are so many contemporary things happening here, there are so many cities with interesting people who are trying to change the continent.”

Of course there’s the Jeff Koons “Balloon Dog (Orange),” but as a museum of the Dachshund opens in Bavaria and the American Kennel Club prepares to move its AKC Museum of the Dog from St. Louis to New York (there’s another, more plainly named Museum of the Dog in Massachusetts, by the way), is there enough dog art to fill these spaces? (And what’s up with cats?)