Tino SehGal, Untitled Installation–The Guggenheim Museum, through March 10th

From n+1 magazine:

When we walk into the denuded Guggenheim, finally wiggling past Lloyd Wright’s low-ceilinged, dark and deliberately claustrophobia-inducing entrance foyer, it takes us a few seconds to adjust to all the open space spiraling upwards and outwards around us. There’s a couple, good-looking college kids or twenty-somethings, hetero, going at it on the floor of the atrium, near the fountain. The crowd gives them wide berth. They writhe sinuously, mouth to mouth, kissing or pretending to kiss, rising onto their knees, palms flat on the other’s backs. Their hands slide down with exaggerated slowness until the palms rest flat on the floor, the first sign that there’s something artificial at work here, either in the lovers’ determined tantric exhibitionism, or the non-lovers, non-erotic erotics. Yet, as they slide once more into each other, until the black-haired girl is lying across the red-haired kid’s lap, and he doesn’t so much grab as guide her ass, with the palm again, deliberately flattened against the curve of thigh and cheek, until her legs curl into him, and her shirt rides up to reveal a naked back he will never touch, although it is the touch we are all waiting for, as, instead, she reaches up to cup his face in both hands and pull him down into a kiss, soundless this whole time, it is difficult to know how much of this is, in fact, performance, staging, whatever you want to call it, and what feelings or other unintentional stirrings we’re also witness to. More…

Recently published papers in The International Journal of the Arts in Society include:

• Chicano Art as Alternative Media: Its Influence on US Popular Culture (And Beyond) by Regina Marchi.
• Locus Solus by Sozita Goudouna.
• Pleasure Versus Pressure in the Piano Lesson: Music Education and Examinations in Malaysia by Jason Kong-Chiang Tye.
• The Postcolonial Sentimental: Imagining Cornelio by René J. Marquez.
• Process and (As) Community in Public Art: Audience Participation in Creating Art, Place and Meaning by Kevin Todd.
• The Conundrum of Medium Specificity: How can the Engagement with a Postmodern Juxtaposition of Media also Promote Medium Specificity? by Andrea Thoma.

• The Venetian Heritage of Dalmatia (Or the “Balkan” Heritage of Venice?) by Thomas E. Schweigert.
• Symphony Audience Development: Analysis of Organizational Culture in the Performing Arts by Erin E. Carey.
• The Influence of European Arts on Bagh-e-Golestan: The Qajarid Garden by Sedigheh Golshan.
• Fifty Years On the Road: Images of the Car in Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ by Jonathan Peter Day.
• Post-pastoral Ceramics: A Distinctive Ecological Language by Julia Jones.
• South African Cinema in a Global Marketplace by Damon Jon Heatlie.

The latest issue of The International Journal of the Arts in Society includes:

• Second Life: Performing the Real in Digital Arts by Leman Giresunlu.
• The Japanese Garden, Humanism, and the Contemporary American Landscape by Min Lum Mossman.
• On the Threshold-looking In: Bakhtin’s Concept of Dialogue in Visual Art Education by Gabriele Esser-Hall.
• The New Triple A Art, Archive and Artefact – At the Military Museums Lessons and Implications from a Converged Environment by Colleen Sharpe and John Wright.
• Space and Pedagogy: Explorations of Space through Poetry and Contemporary Art Practices in India by Dipalle Parmar - Haworth.
• Engaging Objects: The Talking Objects Programme at the British Museum by Emma Poulter.

• The Violence of the Unsaid in Van Sant’s Elephant and Paranoid Park: The Active Role of the Viewer in Creating Narrative Meanings by Ana Paula Barroso.
• Japanese Fireworks (Hanabi): The Ephemeral Nature and Symbolism by Damien Liu-Brennan and Mio Bryce.
• Writing ‘whiteness’: Representing the Afrikaner in post-apartheid South Africa – a comparative study of Athol Fugard’s “Sorrows and Rejoicings” (2002) and Jason Xenopolous’ “Promised Land” (2002) by Tamar Meskin and Tanya van der Walt.
• The Cult of the New and the Work of Critique by Angeliki Spiropoulou.
• Water Over Skin: A Post-colonial Analysis of Cultural Identity - Overcoming a Sense of Shame by Daphne Cazalet.
• Transforming Hamilton, Creatively: Changing a City from a Cowtown to a Wowtown by Cheryl Reynolds.

By Randy Kennedy from The New York Times…

After a museumgoer’s trip and fall opened a rip in a century-old Picasso painting last week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, officials there assured the public that — nightmarish as accidents are at a place entrusted with protecting priceless art — conservators would be able to fix the work quickly, in time for a major Picasso show in April.

But two other rare mishaps at the Met in recent years have provided hard lessons about the difficulty of making broken masterpieces whole again and of predicting when they will go back on view.

In 2002 a 15th-century marble statue by the Venetian sculptor Tullio Lombardo — one of the most important High Renaissance statues in the museum’s collection — crashed to the floor and broke into hundreds of pieces when part of its dense plywood base buckled. Nearly six years later an Andrea della Robbia terra-cotta relief from the same period shattered after falling from a shelf above a doorway. Neither piece is back on view. More…

The most recent issue, Volume 4, Number 5, of  The International Journal of the Arts in Society includes:

• Art: An Integrated Part of Built Environment: Case Study of Kashan Residential Quarters’ Centers by Zahra Ahari and Fatemeh Goldar.
• Fluidity, Shift and Bloom: Understandings of an Oceanic Sublime in an Age of Ecological Collapse by Fiona Edmonds-Dobrijevich.
• Pedagogy, Programs, Projects and Partnerships by Linda McLeod.
• Reading the Transnational out of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s A Tale of Love: How a Film Serves as a Public Pedagogue and What it Teaches by Julia Yujie Li.
• The Arts in a Time of Recession by Marque-Luisa Miringoff and Sandra Opdycke.
• Backpack Journalism: Observations on Digital Media’s Effect on Arts Journalism & Criticism in the U.S. by Johanna Keller.

This thread over at Unfogged reminds me of something that’s puzzled me for years, ever since reading this: why didn’t prints displace paintings the same way that printed books displaced manuscript codices? Why didn’t it become the expected thing that visual artists, like writers, would primarily produce works for reproduction? (No doubt, in that branch of the wave-function*, obsessive fans still want to get the original drawings, but obsessive fans also collect writer’s manuscripts, or even their typewriters, as well as their mass-produced books.) 16th century engraving technology was strong enough that it could implement powerful works of art (vide), so that can’t be it. And by the 18th century at least writers could make a living (however precarious) from writing for the mass public, so why were visual artists (for the most part) weren’t artists? (Again, it’s manifestly not as though technology has regressed.) Why is it still the case that a real, high-class visual artist is someone who makes one-offs? I know that reproductions have been important since at least the late 1800s, but for works and artists who first made their reputation with unique, hand-made objects, which is as though the only books which got sent to the printing press were ones which had first circulated to acclaim in manuscript. More…

The fifth issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of the Arts in Society is available.

Some of the papers included in Volume 4, Number 5:

• Making Sense of the Absurdity of Life in Camus’s the Myth of Sisyphus by Ashkan Shobeiri, Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya and Arbaayah Ali Termizi.
• Re-viewing Feminist Influences in Transnational Art: A Multimodal, Fugal Analysis of Mary Kelly’s Texts of ‘Maternal Desire’ by Ruth Skilbeck.
• Community and Community-based Art Making by Ronald Aman.
• Rhetoric and Service Learning in Addressing the Challenges of Diversity by Sarah O’Connor.
• Electric Cowboy Cacophony: A Project for Cross-genre Free Improvisation by Michael Edwards.
• The Museum of Desire: Cognition in Performance and Reception by Rick Kemp and Brian Jones.