MoMA's new admission price $20???

(You know how you can tell some threads are going to reach the 300+ posts mark? I predict that with this one.)

xpost

are you sure it wasn't a 3d video projection of bill viola?

2) To be fair, children under 16 are free if accompanied by an adult (though I doubt that helps any of us).

3) The Guggenheim and the Whitney are also overpriced, and so, for that matter, are the movies. That's why I rarely go to any of them. Galleries in Chelsea, on the other hand, are free, and often more fun.

"Meanwhile, the museum has benefited from some $65 million in publicly funded cash subsidies over the past five years — not to mention all the tax revenues forgiven because of its status as a cultural institution.

Nor should anyone think the MoMA is unimpeachably not-for-profit, beyond even the legal definition of the term: Last year, for example, the MoMA's director, Glenn Lowry, was reported to have earned some $570,000 in salary.

Maybe he deserves that kind of money. And surely there are powerful rationales for publicly subsidizing cultural institutions like the MoMA (even as its ticket price is slated to soar to $20). Most museums in the city receive some subsidies."

yes, MoMA is mostly privately funded, but to say that public arts funding is non-existent is just completely wrong.

-- phil-two (philtw...) (webmail), October 5th, 2004 1:22 PM. (phil-two) (later) (link)

moma is one of the most prominent cultural institutions in the country, so that doesn't surprise me. you can argue its ethics, but it's not unusual for instutitions of moma's profile and calibre.

i'm not sure that general description fits the reality, h.s.

I think the bigger public funding crisis in NYC right now (that nobody will talk about) is the starving of the MTA by Pataki. They're going to raise fares AGAIN, y'know.

Plus if Bush gets re-elected and re-configures the determination for granting public housing subsidies, NYC is really gonna be fucked. We're gonna have far more problems than just a too-expensive art museum.

-- nabisco (--...) (webmail), October 5th, 2004 1:28 PM. (nabisco) (later) (link)

of course, but as far as prestige/money/power goes, moma:art museums::yale:universities

i dunno, my gut tells me that's a grotesquely large salary, but plenty of people make that kind of money, and i guess the moma director deserves it more than a lot of them

nabisco otm

hstencil nutso

xxxxxxpost

hstencil and amateurist in total agreement shocka!

i was putting "market logic" in light-ironic quotation marks btw :-)

But geez, Stencil, I don't think you quite need to damn all reference to markets in order to avoid being a Republican; it's not as if we're locked in some epic deathstruggle between mega-cutthroat capitalism and socialism. I mean, as a point of principle: if you're trying to judge whether a person's salary seems appropriate, it seems pretty necessary and non-political to me to look at whether there's any concrete arrangement of supply and demand that justifies it. After all, the whole problem with CEO salaries is that in the end you can't justify them by examining the CEO's "value" in any kind of job/talent marketplace.

or you could just go when it's free, thursday or friday nights or whatever.

either way, it's so packed out all the time that i doubt they are noticing your absence...

BTW, with a membership guest tickets are $5 apiece. So if one person gets a 75 membership, they can get four others in for 20. Seems fair to me.

just renewed my membership and have determined that, now that I'm working from home, Thursdays are likely going to be my museum-as-office day. You can make phone calls and work in the garden, go in for art, back out for work, back in for lunch, back out for an hour or two, back in again. Eight hour museum trips let that action really set in.

Headed back today to retry the kittredge and abramovich; the latter fucked my head about a bit on thursday. I talked to one of the artist/artworks for a half-hour in the garden; that was interesting and helpful!

the abramovich show was really amazing; it was really the kind of performance art I can understand and get behind

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/arts/design/16public.html

“He proceeded to slide his hand onto my ribs and back and then touched my butt,” Mr. Rawls said. “As he was passing me he looked me in the eyes and said

http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/0/0a/Feelsgoodmangreen.jpg

I read The Awl too.

did they do that joke today? i read the times in the coffee shop this morning and came up with it independently

was not familiar with that meme until right now.

Since I mostly go to the films, most of the patrons I see are happy to be breathing; no feel-copping going on.

you're gonna tell me you've never been touched by a man in the titus?

So I saw the Tokyo Avant Garde exhibit today, or half of it anyway, and for the second time I was dumbfounded by the subtle jingoism and whitewashing in a large MoMA exhibition - in this case, the complete lack of mention of the words "hiroshima and nagasaki" on any wall text, as far as I could see. It was so fucking weird, because so much of the art was obviously a response to the atomic bomb (and probably also the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities, also not mentioned). In fact, I couldn't even find text that referred to the United States' role -- instead it was "the allied powers" and even then, I saw little mention other than their "occupation" of Japan following the war. I actually felt a little bit sick about this.

Last time I was there was for the Century of the Child exhibit, and that one was a bit more subtle -- soviet bloc and japanese education was presented as entirely nationalistic and propaganda-based, while american and western european education was free and creative.

LOL you think the MoMa isn't some co-opted bullshit propaganda arm of the establishment? This isn't 20 years ago, bro.

Sure, I mean the other shit I saw was some pointless, innocuous fruitcake who collects and spreads bee pollen sponsored by VW Das Auto. But I was still shocked that an exhibit on fucking POSTWAR JAPAN would not even acknowledge that the United States was like, why postwar Japan was what it was.

Like I'm not looking for radical critique here, I just thought certain basic historic facts were agreed on at this point.

I am kind of surprised they didn't do some sort of hand-wavy WII mentioning TBH, but I think it shows well the level of thought that goes into these installations and how much social credibility one can expect from museums that have been featured in MasterCard ads and shit.

ART SHOULD NOT BE POLITICAL

ART TRANSCENDS

It used terms like "postwar japan" and "allied forces occupation" a lot.

i haven't seen the exhibit but i wonder if it's not a move towards deemphasizing the impact of the united states on post-war japan. not that these pieces of art wouldn't reflect the war and the atomic attack but that they reflect other things that aren't dictated solely by the often overwhelming american projection. it's hard for me to imagine tho that anyone attending MOMA would be unaware of hiroshima and nagasaki.

i just mention this bc i've seen exhibits on post-war vietnam that were entirely about american crimes and went so far in the other direction that you didn't learn anything about vietnam that wasn't actually about the united states.

Yeah but you can't show a bunch of surrealist paintings of people's faces melting off and piles of dead mutant fish and "deemphasize the impact of the United States" at the same time

anyway I also think you're overestimating the MoMA crowd, it's disproportionately tourists

when i used to go to the free friday admissions it was mostly students

well yeah at that time probably. I think you're right that the NYU etc kids going there are all thinking about hiroshima when they see it whether or not the text tells them to.

they've shown about 70 films in the 'sidebar' for this series, many of which are explicit on US/bombs etc.

I haven't seen the gallery exhibit cuz I fucking hate crowds, and it's always crowded.

I've seen the show twice and though I get your point, I think the artwork's placards make it pretty clear that this is reactionary work and that the historical importance of WWII and Hiroshima and Nagasaki IS a given.
But I really liked the artwork and it was all totally new to me so maybe I just wasn't looking for any other agenda.

as someone who likes to cruise around with headphones on & not necessarily read the text is this a good exhibition, y/n

yes the art is good

I only saw the top floor, and I think there was also stuff on the fifth floor, yes? I was in kind of a hurry. Anyway I liked the art, and it was kind of refreshing since, at least until the recent Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Whitney, a casual art fan like myself could kind of get the impression that Japanese art went straight from Hokusai-type prints to cartoony stuff like Murakami.

so Matisse Cut-Outs is running 24hrs this weekend, which means in my zombified state i might make it at 2a.m., waving my membership card.

$12 afterhrs for nonmembers (still need timed tix)

so you still need a timed ticket for like 4 in the morning...

that's my understanding, for nonmembers

http://news.artnet.com/art-world/how-will-momas-bjork-debacle-impact-klaus-biesenbach-279582

As recounted by anonymous sources, Biesenbach interrupted Abramović's precisely-timed 736-hour-and-30-minute marathon action in order to bask in some of the artist's accumulated megawatt company. Scheduled to endure the performer's gaze for a quarter of an hour, the curator lasted just eight minutes.

After vacating the chair, applause followed; but it was obvious from Abramović's expression that something had gone wrong. The problem: Biesenbach had cut the performance short by throwing off its strict time signature. As relayed to artnet News, Abramović was livid.

According to Artforum's Linda Yablonsky, things quickly went from bad to mortifying at Abramović's celebratory dinner. Writing in the “Scene & Herd" column, Yablonsky described the excruciating series of events that followed as “the tippling Biesenbach took the podium" to kick off of the evening:

“He didn't thank anyone. Instead he used the moment to make public his two-decade-long unrequited love for Abramović. ‘Look at me, Marina,' he began. ‘Listen to me, Marina,' he went on. ‘Why don't you look at me? You know,' he then said to the guests, tossing aside his prepared remarks, ‘she can't see anyone without her glasses,' thereby negating the experience of all those sitters who thought she was paying special attention to them. This brought loud murmurs… Recalling how he had fallen in love with Abramović, twenty years his senior, at first sight, he said that he believed she had fallen in love with him, too. ‘Biggest mistake of my career,' he said.”

Aghast at the spectacle, Yablonsky added her own lapidary rejoinder. “Though clearly, not bigger than this one," she wrote, channeling the gathering's dazed chagrin.

big lolz there

A MoMA curator who hangs around with celebrities? Well I never!

a curator who subverts the message of a major artist's retrospective in the closing party by pointing out that she couldn't see anybody anyway and then avowing his love is big lolz

anything that takes that con job down a peg is to be cheered

this is the best

How, for example, does one begin to explain the institutional relevance of the band Kraftwerk's eight-gig show “Retrospective 12345678" staged inside the museum's atrium in 2012? How, one might ask, do you account for the 2013 spectacle of actress Tilda Swinton sleeping inside a glass box at MoMA—

Presumably the same criticism would apply to the Tate Modern who also ran Retrospective 12345678 to near unanimous five star reviews and the Serpentine Gallery who originally did the Swinton piece.

yeah the linked article goes into that

@NickPinkerton
Anyone got any good tips on tonight's mentally-ill hobo fights at MoMA?

apparently that was real (far from unheard of at the theaters there), and might've happened at a Straub-Huillet film.

https://twitter.com/NickPinkerton/status/729063029615284226

Lol, tradition