This photo from the Abramović opening is kind of touching. Her performance in the MoMA atrium is not supposed to include any interaction with those who sit across from her.
The caption from the Facebook album reads:
Ulay, Marina Abramović’s partner from 1975-1988, sits with her during her performance. This was the first time they “performed” together since The Great Wall Walk (1988), when they each walked over 1,200 miles (2,000 km) along the Great Wall of China starting at opposite ends and meeting in the middle to say their goodbye.
Somebody in the comments asks the obvious: “I thought there was to be no interaction with the art.” To which the moderator responds: “Correct, no interaction, but this was her partner in life and art for 12 years who she has had almost no contact with since 1988…”
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George Lois on the first cover he art directed for Esquire:
Hayes mentioned that we were going to have a spread of Floyd Patterson, the boxing champion of the world, and Sonny Liston, the challenger, and Patterson was an 8–1 favorite. I knew right away what I was going to do, because I knew that Liston was going to kill him. So I called the photographer, and I said, “We’re going to get a guy with the same body as Patterson, we’re going to lay him flat on the ring, and we’re going to show him killed, knocked out by Liston. Leave him for dead.” I wanted to show a metaphor for boxing — if you’re a loser, you’re left for dead, which is also a metaphor for life. So we get the shot and I sent it to Hayes.
“George, I never saw a cover like this in my life! You’re calling the fight — suppose you’re wrong? Everybody says you’re wrong.” I told him we had a 50/50 chance of it working, but if it does, it shows we have balls. It hit the newsstand a week before the fight, and it was roundly laughed at in the sports crowd. But a week later, of course Liston kills Patterson, just like I thought. And Esquire got tons of publicity and the best sales since the start of the magazine. And Harold said to me, “You gotta keep doing my covers.”
He went on to create 92 iconic covers during the 1960s that were exhibited at MoMA and added to the permanent collection. Unfortunately only five of the covers have their image rights cleared to display online. Not many people realize that even if a work is “owned” by the museum, having the right to display it online is another matter. This is an issue the Brooklyn Museum has addressed nicely on their blog. This is why photography is usually not allowed in museums, except within the older permanent collections.
Link via Jason Kottke
Marina Abramović is having a retrospective here at MoMA. It’s the first time a performance artist has had such a show, which will include reenactments of her pieces by other performers. The main event is a new endurance piece:
Marina Abramović will perform in the Atrium at MoMA throughout the
duration of the exhibition, starting before the Museum opens each day
and continuing until after it closes.
The New Yorker has an article (subscriber-only) on the exhibition that I haven’t read yet. There’s also a podcast interview with Judith Thurman, who wrote the article, that provides some useful context.
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Oh man, I can’t believe it’s been a whole year!
It was one year ago tomorrow that we launched the latest redesign of MoMA.org. (March 6 is a day that will be forever ingrained in the Digital Media team’s memory!) But MoMA has had an online presence for fifteen years now, since 1995, when an exhibition site for the design show Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design was developed. The following year, the Museum’s website, MoMA.org, officially launched, and we’ve been doing exhibition feature sites ever since.
One year ago I was working remotely from Groningen, NL where Ellie was doing a study abroad program. The weeks leading up to launch day were pretty brutal, probably my most intense working process since college. It seems so absurd, in retrospect, that most of it went down for me in that sleepy Dutch college town. Happy birthday MoMA.org! It was worth it.
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Franklin Gothic is the basis of MoMA’s typographic identity. August Hefner found some examples of Franklin Gothic being used at the museum dating back to the 1930s. One of the signs reads:
The public is urgently requested to visit the Galleries in the morning, from 10 to 12 and evening from 8 to 10 in order to avoid congesting the elevator service. If this request is complied with, it will not be necessary to charge admission.
I didn’t realize that the museum’s adaptation of the typeface, MoMA Gothic, was created by the same type designer as the original.
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I was happily surprised to see this interview by Shannon Darrough, who I work with on MoMA.org.
Nakamura’s MONO*crafts 2.0 was also a big inspiration for me when I was first getting into web design. It feels dated now, of course, but I remember feeling thrilled to see this bold assertion in the navigation: interfaces can be impractical, users can be invited to explore and play.
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Going through our site statistics this morning Allegra discovered that our largest spike in traffic (ever, it seems) happened on February 1st. A significant portion of that day’s site visitors came from a Korean site called Naver. I haven’t explored the details much, but it seems that on that one day Naver sent us around 64,000 hits (uniques?) to the Tim Burton exhibition subsite.
Crap, it’s becoming a regular feature isn’t it?
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This is another MoMA-related bragging post, which I hope doesn’t turn into a regular feature here. Out of the dozens of questions we fielded that night I contributed (correct!) answers to exactly two, neither of which had to do with art history. Best team name goes to Glenn Lowry’s Apt (no official affiliation).
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For the last year and a half I’ve been freelancing at MoMA’s digital media department, helping develop the MoMA.org front-end. In many ways it has been an ideal client for me: dependable pay, flexible terms, interesting work and people I get along with. I think I’ve done my best web development work here. So I’m very proud to see our efforts being recognized by Kunstpedia. Judith Dobrzynski summarizes the results on ArtsJournal:
The Museum of Modern Art takes the blue ribbon, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art not far behind.
Kunstpedia analyzed more than 680 museum websites worldwide, and ranked them thusly: “The scores are determined by comparing ranking data such as those of Google Page Rank, Alexa Ranking and Compete Ranking. Furthermore the number on-line references in the form of incoming links and references in user generated content have been analysed. The end score was determined by the sum of each individual score, given on basis of the position within the different data source which were analysed.”
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