In 1996, sculptor Ron Mueck presented the world with a very different version of Pinocchio per the request of—of all people—his mother-in-law. Mueck’s statue depicts the marionette post-human transformation and gives the line “I’m a real boy!” entirely new meaning. As with all the sculptures in Ron Mueck, by National Gallery of Victoria curator David Hurlston, the figure’s realism is simultaneously astonishing and unsettling.
When photographer Ishimoto Yasuhiro asked modernist architect Tange Kenzō to write an essay for his book of Katsura photographs, he inadvertently pitted architectural and photographic approaches against each other. Kenzō’s enthusiastic reaction was akin to Dad “helping” with his child’s science fair by reshaping the vision of the project; instead of merely contributing an essay, he cropped, resized, and reorganized the pictures into what became the “landmark” work.
Going to a summer wedding? (Or going to four, as the case may be for Yale University Press’s Paper Doll?) Check out the outfit she has put together, and if you like it, let her know in the comments section, and she may coordinate a personal ensemble just for you!
Evelyn Toynton’s forthcoming Icons of America biography, Jackson Pollock, explores how Pollock’s tortured and conflicted character transformed popular culture. Against a backdrop of criticism that found American art inferior to its European counterpart (Marcel Duchamp wrote that “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.”), Pollock’s controversial, even rebellious, work was provocative for generations old and new.
Michelle Stein— In The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960, Richard Longstreth documents the development of the department store as it moves from “a great, all-inclusive emporium that helped define the character and the purpose of the city” to its transformation into shopping centers and malls. Here in New York City,
Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945, edited by Art Institute of Chicago curators Peter Kort Zegers and Douglas Druick to accompany an exhibition on view there until October 23, 2011, examines an art form that had been forgotten until now. The stenciled, handmade posters made by the Soviet TASS news agency during WWII are now available to the English-speaking public for the first time.
You may have caught the mention in the letters to the editor from this past weekend’s issue of the New York Times Book Review, or perhaps you read the interview with FiveBooks on the “philosophical stakes of art”, but it is unmistakable that the voice of art critic Michael Fried
When modern artists like Picasso and Matisse first started trying to sell the public on their work, the experience was extremely difficult—everyone knows just how successful Van Gogh was, after all. Sometimes it took a little extra marketing on the painter’s part in order to close a sale. In Karen