More greatness..this time art history captions

Found here in case the slideshow is giving you trouble.

Good things from across the web...

...descriptively titled.

“This is Seara, my sea rabbit." 

"Oh, he’s…cute. Thanks for letting me take your picture.” 

“You can pet Seara if you would like. He is very gentle.”

• When you photograph New Yorkers, you know things are bound to get a bit strange.
• "The stars would come in one by one. They just waltzed in,' she said." - This other photogrpaher named Sherman
• Going dotty at Voitton on 5th Avenue and other bad metaphors that I'll spare you.
• "I’m not sure you could convince me that this elevator didn’t have a floor labeled ’Tim Burton's Apartment’."
• Ghosts in the Machine open at New Museum.
• Banksy the Olympian torches advertising
• Tom Waits nararrating John Baldessari. 6 minutes

And in other news, I fly to Hungary in 40 days. Nothing is ready, except I did get my passport back. But who's counting?

#fortunewall

I pass this at least a couple times a week. So far it hasn't quite worked--it's a tall order for every day to be the best day of your life--but its a nice thing to pass by.

On the corner of Allen and Rivington.

Alighiero Boetti’s World-weaving at MoMA

Detail, Tutto (Everything)

Check out my piece on Alighiero Boetti’s World-weaving at MoMA over on Escape Into Life. Boetti’s large woven and embroidered tapestries are the showstoppers of the Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan exhibition, and they have a fascinating history involving the artist's time in Afghanistan.

Me too, Banksy, me too.

Corner of Delancy and Ludlow

Hungarian Parliament Drooling

I got more orientation materials about my upcoming trip, and today it included a lot of photos of the beautiful Hungarian Parliament building. It was meant to get us excited about coming, and let me tell you, its working.

Photographer Eva Besnyö at the Jeu de Paume

There is a great article on Hyperallergic about the Eva Besnyö exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris right now. Besnyö was a Hungarian photographer who worked from the 1930s onward and died in 2003. This exhibition is the first to bring together her work from her early years in Berlin, her later years in the Netherlands, and her continued trips back to Hungary.

Although she come of age with other famous Hungarian emigre artists such as Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, György Kepes, and Robert Capa, she has not gotten the same amount of recognition. Eva Besnyö (1910–2003): The Sensuous Image is up at the Jeu de Paume through September 23.

Ryan Pickart's Portraits

Ingrid, Ryan Pickart

I came across oil painter Ryan Pickart's work over on Escape Into Life here. It's a bit like a modern Klimt, in pastel oils rather than gilt, but still with those big languid eyes, no? They just jump out of the flat, decorative background.

The artist has more work, including some lovely sketches, on his blog.

Alina, Ryan Pickart

F-111

F-111 is a ginormous billboard of a painting Pop artist James Rosenquist made in the 60s. On view now at MoMA as it was originally displayed in the Leo Castelli gallery, its aluminum panels wrap around the four walls.

Having seen the work before hanging full length on one wall, I was more than a little surprised to see it crumpled up like this. I think it prefer it all stretched out--it struck me as more monumental that way. What do you think?

RGB Colorspace Atlas and Mantis Shrimp

RGB Colorspace Atlas, Volume 2 (2011)

As part of Ecstatic Alphabets, MoMA has a set Tauba Auerbach's colorful books on view. These three thick objects display every color the human eye can see in a three-dimensional, ordered way. The museum plaque probably describes the project best:

"Human eyes typically have three types of color receptors on their retinas, each sensitive to a different range of wavelengths of light. The colors associated with these wavelengths are approximately red, green, and blue. Because there are three types of color receptors, it is possible to map the visible spectrum in a three-dimensional spatial model by assigning red, green, and blue each to a dimension. It is then possible to outline a cube in this space, where the values of red, green, and blue are visible on a gradient scale of 0 - 100% in their respective dimensions. These gradients combine to create the RGB color space cube, a volume in which any color can be located by a set of three coordinates. RGB Colorspace Atlas, both a sculptural object and spatialization of color, consists of three books. Each volume contains the entire visible spectrum mapped out over 3,632 pages, representing the RGB cube sliced in a different direction: vertically, horizontally, and from front to back."

Of course, the volumes at MoMA were behind glass cases, so no one can flip through them. This video helps you imagine it though: 

Radiolab recently did a fascinating episode on color (bringing in Victoria Finlay, whose book I wrote about, as a guest). As the Auerbach blurb notes, human eyes typically have three types of color receptors (although a few women may have four through a quirk of genetics). However, some animals have many more--and thus see many more wavelengths, and colors, than we can imagine. The technicolor mantis shrimp has 16 kinds of color receptors. Can you imagine what the world looks like to it? Or, for that matter, what an attempt at spatial representation of its color spectrum would look like?

For more about woman with four kinds of color receptors, the discovery of color, whether color existed in the same way to Homer and the ancient Greeks, and much more, I highly recommend the Radiolab episode.