Found Around NYC...

A Brief Encounter...

My graduate media studies professor, teaching visual storytelling, had us watch the black and white classic,  A Brief Encounter.  The music is wonderful (Rachmaninov). I recommend you listen to Argerich plays Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No.3 1st mov Pt.1, below, while you work away.  It might brighten your day as it did mine. (The movie was great, too.)

Warhol's Art Sets Record...

Mao Wow for Warhol!!! The auction record for a Warhol was set last night when a Hong Kong billionaire bought the blue portrait of Chairman Mao for $17.4 million, New York magazine reported.

The art market went out the roof last week. Historical records were set with the art auction at Christie's in New York City.  The $1 billion mark was passed with Christie's sales hitting $730 million (Sotheby's sales totals were $476 million) and Christie's still had more auctions.

What I find interesting is the article, by Alexandra Peers, noted that the Metropolitan Museum will be giving Neo Rauch, a "super-hot" Leipzig School painter a one-man show next summer and noted one of his works sold for $296,000.

NYC.  Such a hot art market.

Photo: Christies.com via New York Magazine

A Wicked Halloween...

Get Wicked! Well, the Broadway musical Wicked (winner of 15 major awards) is celebrating its third year with a wicked week of activities. The week leading up to Halloween should be fun... The London show launched the end of  September.

Wicked has been one of our favorites from the first week we moved here and one of the top musicals, check out the week's Wicked events which include:

• A "Be Wicked" Singing Contest, 5:0o p.m. October 25 at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square on Broadway between 45th and 46th
• A Cast Appearance 11:00 a.m. Friday, October 27th, NBC Experience Store, Rockefeller Plaza
• Wicked Day Block Party, 11: oo a.m. - 2:00 p.m. Sunday October 29th at the Gershwin Theatre, 51st between Broadway and 8th.  If you are one of the first 100 people to arrive in greenface, you can receive a free copy of "Son of a Witch" by Wicked author Gregory Maguire.

Wicked, Witchy Events for the Halloween season, New York City-style.  So Ozmapolitan!

More on Wicked on MotherPie, image credit

Columbus Parade Mirrored in Art...

The best place to get a good view of the Columbus Day Parade down Fifth Avenue was looking in the big mirror at Rockefeller Center.

London-based artist Anish Kapoor's 23-ton concave mirror is only here for five weeks -- until October 27th.   

It is one of the best pieces of public art to see.  Kapoor's Cloud Gate in Chicago's Millenium Park is probably his best-known piece and the commissioned artwork was installed in 2004.  Also reflective, inspired by liquid mercury, it holds no color of its own.  It is sometimes referred to as the Electric Kidney Bean.  Throngs gather to see the reflections, which is a constant art work in and of itself.   

Dogs...

Dogs, dogs, dogs.  New Yorkers love their dogs just like the medieval citizens loved theirs.  It isn't a Renaisssance fashion at all.

This dog, left, is depicted on a tapestry in the Metropolitan Museum.

Cy Twombly...

Postmodern?  Cy Twombly's art, right, looks like it is just chalk scribbles on a board.  It has an air of mystery and of ambiguity. This one, right, is at the Museum of Modern Art.  Twombly is considered an abstract expressionist. The Kootz Gallery in New York City was the site of Twombly's first exhibit in 1951.  He is one of the most intruiging living artists with his work influenced by the childlike drawings of Paul Klee (Twombly is considered to be the first American artist to use scribblings -- a precurser to the graffiti art style).

One of the most extensive Twombly collections opened in 1995 at the Menil museum in Houston.  The Menil's Cy Twombly Gallery is the most interesting display and one can see his works en masse.

Guggenheim...

This is the season when a lot of work continues before the bad weather sets in.

One of my favorites.

Art Car...

Maybe this car, all decked out in shells and parked on Fifth Avenue across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was a car duded up for the Houston Art Car Parade.

Those sorts of artsy car sightings are more common in Texas since they've been more into rolling art.

Maybe something has come to NYC and I'm too new to know about it.

Park Art...

The streets and parks are full of talented artists displaying their works.  Sometimes it seems as though NYC is just one big outdoor gallery. 

This painting was hung naked -- without a frame -- with other works on canvas by the artist on a beautiful day in Union Square.

The parks and urban spaces come alive with creativity.  So much blooms in the urban spaces.

Klimt's Art: New Heights Mean New Relevance?

Gustav Klimt: artist of the most expensive painting ever sold.  Adele Block-Bauer I (1907) in June sold for a record price for a work of art - $135 million.

Ronald S. Lauder, of cosmetic fame, bought it for the Neu Galerie, a small museum of German and  Austrian art at Fifty Avenue and 86th.  The painting, along with four other Klimits, is on display there.

The work is reviewed in the 7/24 New Yorker in an article, Golden Girl, by Peter Schjeldahl.  "Is it worth the money? Not yet," he writes, saying that the booming art market's new motto might be irrational exhuberance (Picasso's Boy With a Pipe sold two years ago for $104 million).  The new Klimt record is four and a half times the previous high for Klimt, Schjeldahl notes.

Is this new relevance for an artist previously considered second-tier? Perhaps.  Klimt's work seems to pre-date/anticipate the current art manipulations of the digital environment.  His works almost seem to have a photo-shopped quality, a tromp d'oeil effect of symbolism and styles. Known as a rebel and the founder of the Vienna Secession, he synthesized a diverse range of sources in an individualistic way.  Classic art and photography as well as sensual subjects (Adele was thought to be his mistress) became reframed, referenced and subjects were deconstructed and restructured in his own style.  His painting, Birch Forest, seems to be a digitally-manipulated work.  Real with a touch of surreal.

Just as the Dadaist movement can be reframed now to be understood afresh in terms of the seismic cultural shift of tech/internet we are experiencing today, Klimt and his style might be more relevant now than they were at the turn of the 20th century.