– THE BIG STORY –

Want a mediated art art experience? Why not head to the Louvre? The paradigmatic French museum—which has persistently rebuffed the Google Art Project‘s efforts to bring it on board—has officially debuted new interactive guides to its world-spanning treasures that run on Nintendo‘s handheld 3DS gaming systems, allowing viewers to explore the institution with the aid of 3-D models, ultra-high-def photos, and audio features. This makes sense in some ways: the most popular museum in the world and one of the largest, the Louvre is also notoriously baggy, its epic corridors stuffed with a near infinitude of examples of works by classical artists—do we really need that many Tiepolos, crammed even into bathroom alcoves?—that make navigating its masterpieces almost impossible in just one or two trips. (The French have a strategy for cutting through this problem, as seen in Godard‘s Bande à Part.) But thus far technology has not been much of a help in engendering intimate art experiences at the Louvre, as anyone who has gone to the Mona Lisa room knows: the hulking crowds gathering around the painting raise their iPhone cameras or video recorders to capture an image of the legendary portrait as proof they were there and then leave, rarely so much as glancing at Veronese‘s Wedding at Cana on the other wall (quite a feat, considering how gigantic it is). With the Google-led virtualizing of the museum experience bringing art online, and the Louvre’s high-teching of the actual, in-person art interaction bringing the virtual into the museum, perhaps it’s time to update Walter Benjamin‘s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” for a new era.

– QUOTE OF THE DAY –

“One of the biggest things happening in the art world is this idea of expansion. No one embodies this aspect of what art is becoming better than James Franco.” – Los Angeles MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch on everyone’s favorite arch-meta-celebritartist, whose new show Rebel is opening at the museum next month

– MUST READ –

Orhan Pamuk Opens Fictional Museum – The Turkish Nobel laureate has unveiled a real-life version of the museum he dreamed up in his 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence—a book about a man who builds a curated shrine to the objects his dead beloved has touched—and the author has some very odd plans for it, saying, “I’m going to work on this for 20 years, till I die. It will be fun.” (There’s even a website.) (FT)

The Greatest In-Flight Artist of All Time – When it comes to toilet paper artistry, Maurizio Cattelan has nothing on Nina Katchadourian, a multimedia artist who has been staging astonishingly good recreations of famed Old Master paintings by sneaking into airplane bathrooms with her (cell phone?) camera and attiring herself in period garb fashioned from the absorbent bathroom tissue. (Daily Mail)

Holland Cotter Goes to Africa – The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times art critic has embarked on a month-long tour of the continent’s art scene, and in his first dispatch he traces the sociopolitically fraught progression of the region’s artistic movements from Negritude to Afrocentrism to the more conflicted, individualistic path artists are taking today. (NYT)

The Link Between Kraftwerk and Joseph Beuys? – MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach, who organized the techno group’s concert retrospective at the Modern, ranks the band alongside other German cultural pioneers as Fassbinder and Beuys, a student of whose was responsible for the band’s “most striking graphic images.” (NYT)

From Bauhaus to Barbican – Rowan Moore takes the London museum’s new survey of Bauhaus art and architecture as an opportunity to concisely trace the history of the Walter Gropius-founded movement, which had prominent detractors (from the Nazis to, memorably, Tom Wolfe) but has critically shaped contemporary art, architecture, and design. (Guardian)

John Cusack Knocks Over the Getty Museum — The actor staged a bold daytime heist in full view of a compliant museum official, stealing a bag of potato chips from the Getty’s cafe. (NYM)

– ART MARKET –

Eleven Rivington Opens Second Gallery – Augusto Arbizo, the hot downtown gallery’s director, says that they will be opening a new, bigger space at 195 Chrystie Street at the end of this month, inaugurating it with a two-gallery show of new work by Michael DeLucia. (Art in America)

Amy Cappelazzo Reveals Secret Source of Her Power – The Christie’s contemporary art dealmaker wields a fist-sized hunk of quartz when conducting business over the phone, like some kind of conceptual-art sorceress. (NYT)

Hollywood star Orlando Bloom bought a Sarah Braman sculpture from her show in Los Angeles’s International Art Object. (Facebook!)

Maccarone Gallery is expanding, taking over a former dry cleaner’s around the corner and hoping to incorporate it into the sprawling, bunker-like existing space by June. (NYT)

– IN & OUT –

The Guggenheim has awarded this year’s batch of its fellowships to 181 artists, scholars, and scientists, including the artists Ellen Altfest, Nayland Blake, Dawn Clements, Louise E. Belcourt, and Chitra Ganesh. (Artforum)

Guy Jennings has been named chairman of Christie’s Impressionist and Modern department—replacing Thomas Seydoux, who resigned last week—and Brooke Lampley (expect to see more of her soon) is heading up the department in New York. (Gallerist NY)

Veteran Chicago art dealer Donald Young, who ran Young Hoffman with noted gallerist Rhona Hoffman before founding his own space in 1983, has passed away at the age of 69. (Gallerist NY)

The renovated Drawing Center will reopen this September with 50 percent more exhibition space and shows of works-on-paper by Guillermo Kuitca and José Antonio Suárez Londoño plus a performance series underwritten by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. (NYT)

The NEA has selected L.A. County Arts Commission veteran Ayanna Hudson to be its new director for arts education, replacing Sarah Cunningham. (LAT)

– VIDEO –

Watch Damien Hirst give a (highly opinionated) tour of his Tate Modern retrospective. (Guardian)

Posted on: April 16th, 2012 by Andrew
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