Tomorrow Museum » Archive » ….But the President Elect Doesn’t Have Great Taste in Art

This is an aside titled '….But the President Elect Doesn’t Have Great Taste in Art' dated 11/14/08

“I don’t know if I would’ve supported Obama as much as I did if I realized his favorite art work was a Pre-Raphaelite painting” - Hrag Vartanian

Posted by Joanne on Nov. 14, 2008

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Asides
- Giant knit rabbit on a hill in Italy by gelitin. Something similar from Florentijn Hofman in the Dushi show at Galerie West in The Hague.
- "Anonymity can be useful not just to cloak your identity or to try to fool people. It allows people who might pass something along to not be too caught up in the question of 'who’s behind this?'. Instead, the idea exists on its own terms, which makes people a little more inclined to actually press Forward on the email." - Bill Wasik in an interview with The Bygone Bureau.
- Kathryn Bigelow is finally getting her due (Steady Diet of Film, Slate, Salon, etc.) This month Harvard Film Archive has a retrospective of her work (see her in person July 2nd, introducing Hurt Locker.) In addition to Near Dark, Point Break, and Strange Days, among others, Bigeow also directed part of the prescient Scientology critique Wild Palms.
- This article on Ray Bradbury is getting a lot of attention. I found it needlessly mocking. It is hard to believe Brandbury talked as much at length about Bo Derek as reported, and if he did, maybe it was at the reporter's prompting. Another inexplicable reference that made it in the article was that Bradbury once watched the film “Pumping Iron.” Newsworthy! LA based Jennifer Steinhauer, who typically covers the govenator, seemed to have a lapse of judgement over what is worthy of inclusion. Bradbury, at 88, doesn't have much time left to impart his wisdom, and I'm sure most of us, California residents or otherwise, find his views on the communities and libraries far more interesting than the celebrity fluff that padded the article. Sure he sounds like an old crank, but he's an old crank who wrote Fahrenheit 451! Rather than fishing for goofy quotes, why not ask worthwhile followup questions about what he really thinks about higher education or the Internet? Here's a far better profile of Yinka Shonibare MBE including a clip from an upcoming Art 21 episode on the artist.
- Death of a Dystopian, my article on the life and work of J. G. Ballard is up on Reason. "His writing is obsessed with the territories where the organic meets the inorganic; it is absurdist, bleak, vivid, and awake to the psychological effects of media and manmade landscapes. In the words of the novelist Martin Amis, 'Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different—a disused—part of the reader’s brain.'”
- More fake curators please. (Actually, the reason I picked the URL was because I hoped people would mistake it for a real place, as some physical location/organization/backing sponsorship grants a blogger immediate authority. From the start most of my google alerts were people's "to do" lists and sometimes when I say the title of this site in my head I think of it as "Tomorrow: Museum")
- "In April, I gave 13 UW graduate students a simple challenge: make an exhibit that gets strangers to talk to each other. 10 weeks, $300, and a whole lot of post-it notes later, they succeeded." - Nina Simon at Museum 2.0. More on bathroom wall annotation and going places alone.
- Pretty much the best thing about being sick is the opportunity to explore things you always figured you'd like but didn't have the hours sitting in one place to do so. For me this week it was The Wire (I know!) and the French Open. As for the email that piled up in the meantime -- I'm on it.
- The Tomorrow Museum is thrilled by its inclusion in The Morning News' 2009 EDDYS. And hugely flattered by the category "Best Source for Making Sense of It All"! It's a wonderful list of sites that are all worthy of space in your RSS reader.
- "Away We Go was directed by Sam Mendes during a post-production furlough from Revolutionary Road, and, viewed side-by-side, the films form a curious diptych—two portraits, separated by a half-century, of young couples trying to find their place in the world, one adapted from a writer, Richard Yates, who was among the most prescient of his generation, the other from a writer who ranks among the most precious of his." - Scott Foundas in Village Voice. The pairing results in something like a "Mumblecore movie made by David Lean." (via.) More from A. O. Scott, who ends his review "This movie does not like you." (to a "'oh no he di'nt' chorus of praise" all over the Internet, as Cinetrix puts it.) But pretty much everything IFC links to here is gold.
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