While a few “right on”s and “elitist”s trickled in over the weekend, and my favorite–“MoMA is a corporation, the new building is a corporate HQ. You are a foot soldier”–just arrived yesterday morning, the quality of the responses to my little MoMA admissions price challenge did not improve with time.
I should’ve wrapped this up and posted the winners a couple of days ago, but I’ve been too busy hobnobbing with a bunch of MoMA bigwigs (10%) and a kid (99%, Yeah, it doesn’t add up. Tell me about it.)
Author: greg
Dennis Lim Reviews Van Gogh’s Submission
“Artists from Abbas Kiarostami to Shirin Neshat to Ousmane Sembene have confronted the misogyny of conservative Islam in ways that are at once more damning and less willfully profane.”
Still, just because it was at once outrageously incendiary and a lackluster piece of filmmaking, it’s still chilling and despicable that Van Gogh was killed for Submission.
The Day I Became a Martyr: Islam Protest Brings Fatal Fatwa [Village Voice]
Related: greg.org entries for Theo Van Gogh
Raghubir Singh at Sepia International
Was it Documenta where I was taken in by Raghubir Singh’s quietly masterful color photographs of India, which bring an artist’s eye to documentary photos. Gabriel Orozco meets Cartier-Bresson.
There was a great show at the Smithsonian last year, and now his work has come to Sepia International. In his review, The Voice’s Vince Aletti tries to gently correct the art historical record to reflect Singh’s early(-er) and powerful use of color. Scoot over, Egglestone, and let Singh up there on the dais, too.
A Windshield View [Village Voice]
Raghubir Singh: A Retrospective, through Dec. 30 [Sepia International]
Singh Books at Amazon: A Way Into India, River of Colour
A Bridge Too Far Away
Jonathan Glancey gives an invigorating description of Sir Norman Foster & Co’s Grand Viaduc du Millau, an awesome bridge on the A25 running from Paris to the Cote d’Azur.
Come fly with me [Guardian UK]
Not Lost in Translation
Architect Chad Smith plays Scarlett Johanson in his own remake of Lost in Translation: he’s tagging along to the Park Hyatt in Tokyo on his boyfriend’s business trip. The only trouble is, he’s not lost, he’s not depressed, and he’s not confused. And presumably, when he gets back to the US, people at the Golden Globes won’t think he’s a bee-atch.
Stick your nose into his diary at littleminx.com.
Talking About The Weather (Project)
The artist Olafur Eliasson will be speaking at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC about his work, including last year’s The Weather Project at the Tate in London.
Olafur Eliasson, The Demetrion Lecture: Wednesday, Nov. 17 at 7pm. [Hirshhorn.si.edu]
Movie Theaters I’ve Been To That Have Closed
This afternoon on WNYC, Jonathan Schwartz was reading an underwriter plug for Zankel Hall, when he stopped and said, “Some of you may remember that Zankel Hall is in the site of the Carnegie Theater, a movie theater with–well it was very small and down a windy staircase–with personality. So many theaters with personality have closed.”
That got me thinking, while Schwartz rattled off a dozen theaters I’d never heard of, of the theaters that have closed since I moved to New York:
There’s a great website for this kind of thing, Cinema Treasures. And Hiroshi Sugimoto began photographing movie theaters almost 30 years ago, and many of them are now gone.
Advertiser Shoutout
A round of applause to the advertisers who keep greg.org swimming (ok, maybe wading…ok, maybe slightly damp) in MoMA tickets. Please show them we’re not ALL poverty-stricken Marxist anti-consumerists:
Note to self: Feuillade, Richie, Gonzalez, Falluja
Just what’s been on my mind:
In this way, well-publicized planning for the invasion of Fallujah innoculated GWB against mid-election criticism of the administration’s failures in confronting the Iraqi insurgency.
Now that the election’s over and the invasion has begun, Fallujah is exactly the kind of operation that the US military can succeed at, will “succeed” at. This could change the tenor of coverage of the war, even if it does not actually improve stability. Leaders on the ground were extremely critical of the entirely political/Washington-driven Fallujah invasion and pullback last Spring. Who knows if we’ll find out about this one?
MoMA Free Passes Update
Thanks for the response so far. I should say that while I think Kurt Andersen’s idea for the federal government to pay for all the country’s museum entry fees is a good one, I see two problems with it:
1) the problem in the White House, and
2) it’s Kurt Andersen’s idea, so if you’d like me to send him the passes…
Related:
Free Museums for All [Studio 360, 7/28/2001]
My diatribe supporting Billionaires For MoMA which, if you make it to the end, has an offer for free passes.
Blogumentary Blog Blogged
Fimoculous has an excellent collection of articles, interviews [including Rex’s own], and links for the premiere last week of Chuck Olsen’s film/site/project Blogumentary . Check it out.
Blogumentary [mitochondria at fimoculous]
Blogumentary production blog
First, BMWFilms, now Amazon Theater
From the team who ruined BMWFilms.com comes a new collection of dependent shorts, just in time for the holidays. Amazon Theater is a series of five short films “featur[ing] products you can purchase at Amazon.”
Someone’s not getting it in a very deep way. On paper, Amazon Theater should be an ad/film/shoppertainment convergence dream-come-true:
…and a whole mess of directors named Scott: Ridley, Tony, Jordan, Jake.
The films include clickable shopping credits, both for featured and “celebrity products,” but it only goes so far. Whether that makes it half-ass, or just ass, I can’t say.
Take the first short, “Portrait,” an at-once vapid and cynical Heathers-meets-Shallow Hal “fable” which finally answers the best-forgotten question, what did Amanda’s agency on Melrose Place actually create? You can buy the skinny villainess’s corporate bitchwear, but for the cruelly written loser fatchick’s blouse, you’ll have to go to QVC. Annd there’s no link to the dinnerplates she’s constantly eating off of–at work, in her boss’s office–even though they’re on sale, 47% off, for $79.99. Once you unpack it, the story turns on a snide conversation about reading spam, which includes a mention of “bayesian filters”, but there’s no “Spam for Dummies” tie-in. And while they offer Sephora makeup “used in the film,” they ignore the mall-makeover studio, Glamourshots which is the story’s manipulative McGuffin.
Seriously, Amazon Theater is to short films what a hole is to a donut. Or what a donut is to a diabetic. Or what a brain is to the marketing exec who greenlighted this thing. Can’t wait to see how the Chris Noth one turns out.
Shopporrifying links:
“Enjoy the exclusive films in Amazon Theater, our holiday gift to you.”
Buy this Fiestaware Periwinkle 16-piece Dinnerware set for your pathological office binges!
Beauty pageant makeup can reveal your inner worth! Shop at Sephora, or go to the portrait studio at the mall!
[via fimoculous]
Dutch Oven
Scott MacMillan has a wide-ranging, disturbing roundup of the violent aftermath of Theo Van Gogh’s murder and public cremation, including the 5-hour standoff–complete with gunfire and grenades–with militant terrorist suspects in The Hague.
[Slate] Holland in Flames
Religious violence and terror arrests stun the Netherlands in the aftermath of filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s murder.
Free MoMA?? Try F(*#%-ing Expensive MoMA
[Update: I would point out this is my own opinion; I do volunteer work for MoMA, but I don’t speak for the Museum or any of its officers. I wrote this in direct reaction to FreeMoMA.org, which makes a lot of assertions about MoMA that, in my experience, don’t ring true at all.]
And that’s why it’s $20. When the MoMA’s Film curator presented the story of the new building, as told through a series of silent movie title cards and film clips, three scenes got way bigger laughs than the rest:
Glenn Lowry discusses the building with the curatorial staff was the scene from Babe where docile sheep, doing exactly as they’re told, march in formation.
What those curatorial meetings were really like was a shot from Twelve Angry Men where the jurors confront Henry Fonda and tell him why he’s wrong.
But Mike Margitich quickly meets his goal for the capital campaign brought down the house. A 1930’s tuxedo’ed man locks the door, walks over to an elegantly dressed woman, grabs her by the shoulders, and shakes her violently until a wallet drops on the floor. He picks it up, and the two sit down to dinner.
People obviously related. After all, they were at the MoMA Founders dinner Monday night, 200 or so people who had given $1-50+ million each towards the museum’s $858 million capital campaign. Also there: us, Danny Meyer, and the folks from Target who decided to underwrite four years of free Friday evenings at the museum.
Theo Van Gogh Live Cremation Webcast
If the last cremation you watched was in Diamonds Are Forever, now’s your chance to get up to speed and stick it to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism at the same time.
In the event one of the many death threats he received over Submission, his short film decrying abuse of Muslim women, panned out, Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh said he wanted a public cremation. Unfortunately, he’s getting his wish today at 1700h Amsterdam Time, CET, (or 1100 EST).
The Nederland 2 TV network is carrying the event live online, starting at 1650h, which is in like an hour.
Related [??] [Montgomery Advertiser, via Defamer]: “Hagman has stipulated that upon his death, he wants his body to be ground in a wood chipper and scattered in a field, where wheat is to be harvested for a cake to be eaten by his friends and family one year later….” [and if that’s not enough to make you want to live forever, read on…]