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Solitary Birds

For more than thirty years, French artist Jean Luc Mylayne has explored the intimate bond between subject and photographer through a non-traditional approach that combines exacting conception, visionary inventiveness, and infinite patience. Mylayne’s photographic subjects, commonplace birds such as sparrows, starlings, and bluebirds, belie the wholly unique experience that Mylayne captures in his photography. His work embodies exploration and a philosophical meditation on the nature of being in the world.

link: Jean Luc Mylayne June 28 - September 20, 2009 Parrish Museum of Art

Michael Jackson and Bubbles by Jeff Koons.

 Provocative conceptual artist Jeff Koons has made a career of turning tabletop kitsch and American novelties into megalithic icons, and Jackson was not immune. Koons’s porcelain statue of the singer esthetically recalls the precious glass tchotchkes your grandmother might have kept, but the sculpture's message was more suggestive. Part of Koons’s Banality series, the piece is outsized (more than six feet long) and depicts Jackson’s young, male pet chimpanzee nestled in the singer’s arms. It sold for $5.6 million at auction.

via: Jackson in Five: Iconic Artworks of the Late Singer

Michael Jackson R.I.P.

"Erotic City"

The artists, writers and poets associated with Surrealism placed persistent emphasis on the power of the imagination to transform the everyday. Beginning in the early 1930s, the production of elliptically erotic, sexually-charged objects became increasingly central to their concerns.

This exhibition, drawn from the Museum’s collection, includes a number of Surrealism’s most celebrated objects and sculptures, ranging from Salvador Dalí’s bread-and-inkwell-crowned Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933) to Alberto Giacometti’s enigmatic Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object) (1934) to Meret Oppenheim’s notorious fur-lined teacup (1936).

via: modemonline

THE EROTIC OBJECT: SURREALIST SCULPTURE FROM THE COLLECTION

june 24 2009 -> january 04 2010

MoMA

Happy Father's Day

© Henri Cartier - Bresson/ Magnum Photos

“Michelangelo’s First Painting”

Every supernova starts as a modest spark. Even Michelangelo began his career with less than Sistine-worthy work. What, exactly, was he doing? According to the 16th-century art-stargazer Giorgio Vasari, the master’s virgin effort was a smallish, slightly customized painted copy of a German print.

The print, an engraving by Martin Schongauer called “St. Anthony Tormented by Demons,” was in wide circulation when Michelangelo began his art apprenticeship in Florence in 1488. It was at this time, according to Vasari, that he produced the painting. He would have been 12 or 13. It was only later that he turned his attention to sculpture.

Long out of sight, this early picture, or one now identified as such, has resurfaced. Recently bought by the Kimbell Art Museum in Forth Worth, it has been conserved and examined at the Metropolitan Museum, where it is making its American debut in a tiny gallery display titled “Michelangelo’s First Painting.” If the picture is indeed the real thing, it’s quite a catch, being one of only four known easel paintings by Michelangelo, and the only one in an American collection.

via: "A Saint, Demons and a Leap of Imagination"

 By Holland Cotter - The New York Times

"It was an uncertain spring."

"The weather, perpetually changing,

 sent clouds of blue and purple flying over the land."

- The Years 

Virginia Woolf

"Found and Interviewed" -- David Lynch

Fans of David Lynch probably wouldn't have pegged the avant-garde director (Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet) as an Internet star, but he's well on his way now. Lynch launched The Interview Project online this week--he traveled the country and filmed several interviews with strangers, and will post mini-documentaries on the project's Web site every three days. We love the idea of groundbreaking filmmakers taking their work directly to the Web, so we're all for this idea. Plus, it's David Lynch. Come on.

via: The Daily Beast

"Onwards"

Onwards 

from

AKQA 

Baldessari's Biennale Banner

The California artist John Baldessari first came to Venice in the early 1970s, when he was invited to show his works in a Biennale. He recalled, “I slept on top of a Volkswagen bus parked in the Giardini,” the shaded gardens that have been home to the Biennale for well over a century.

This year he is back, ensconced in a hotel and no longer considered part of the avant-garde. At 78 he is one of two winners of the Golden Lion Award, a lifetime achievement prize he is sharing with Yoko Ono .

When Daniel Birnbaum, the Biennale’s artistic director, asked Mr. Baldessari if he wanted to create a work inside the pavilion or out, he immediately opted for the facade.

The choice is vintage Baldessari. For the last five decades he has continually reinvented himself, working in a variety of mediums including painting, photography, books, sculpture and exhibition design, all the while taking inspiration from art history and mass media.

At first he proposed painting on the facade the words “No More Boring Art,” a signature phrase he first used in 1971. (A banner with that sentence hangs off Ca’ Giustinian, a nearby palazzo on the Grand Canal.) But the idea didn’t fly with the Biennale’s organizers.

“They thought some of the artists would have thin skins and think I was talking about them,” he said. Then he suggested placing the phrases “Greetings From” or “Welcome to” above his sky and seascape so it would look just like a postcard. But that idea was shot down too.

“I still hope that instead of sending postcards, people will take a picture of this,” Mr. Baldessari said. “And then e-mail it to their friends.”

via: Frog in Hand (Worth Two Glances) By Carol Vogel, The New York Times