Category: Museums & Parks

Exhibition at the New York Public Library through August 29.

So my last few posts, collectively, were starting to look a bit Comic-Con-esque. That might be kind of inevitable, given summer fare, and it’s not there’s like there’s anything wrong with that, per se, but … there’s more to life. I felt like writing about something that didn’t involve superheros or aliens and whatnot, so at lunchtime I walked down to the public library to check out this exhibit, which has been stuck on my well-intentioned meaning-to-go list for a while.

And as is often the case with stuff on that list, I enjoyed it tremendously once I actually got around to going. The title (alluding to the contentious issue of the government seizing private property for public use or, even more controversially, for private development) is misleading because the exhibit isn’t overtly political and certainly doesn’t deal with that subject directly. The point of the name is to get at the ways in which public and private spaces overlap in urban areas, and though that theme shows up in the exhibit in some artists’ work more than others’, I see where the curators were going with the idea, and it’s interesting.

But I have to admit, too, that I wasn’t thinking much about eminent domain—on either a literal or a metaphoric level—as I wandered through the exhibit. The photographs that really captured me were so arresting, so aesthetically striking and evocative, that I found myself enraptured in enjoying them on that level. These were the kind of photos that don’t find beauty so much as create it, and that, I think, is rare and special.

Special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through September 1.

Having sat through all four hours and seven minutes of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies once, I don’t feel the need to do so again, but when they show up on TV, I like to drop in and catch my favorite scenes. The Bride’s battle with O-Ren Ishii. Her escape from the wooden coffin to the strains of Ennio Morricone. And, of course, the final sequence with Bill, particularly Bill’s monologue about Superman. I love that monologue. The gist is that Superman is the only superhero whose true identity is, in fact, that of a superhero. Unlike Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker and their compatriots—all of whom must wear superheroic costumes to disguise their true, vulnerable selves—Superman must wear a costume to disguise his true, superheroic self. Bill argues that the “Clark Kent” costume represents Superman’s critique of humanity: Clark is weak and uncertain and cowardly, and that is how Superman sees us.

Delivered by David Carradine, it’s a brilliant monologue. Extrapolating from the Superman/Clark Kent theory helps the movies back away from some queasily anti-feminist, essentialist thinking, which is cool, and on a broader level, the monologue gets at some interesting ideas about identity and costume: what costumes disguise, what they reveal, and who we become when we wear them. It’s a rich vein to mine, which is why the Met’s special exhibit on superhero-inspired fashion is surprisingly thought-provoking. It, too, is concerned with identity and costume and transformation. Bill would feel right at home.

Special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 26.

Inside, the enormous shiny metal balloon dog might look overwhelming or creepy, but outside, underneath the vast blue sky on the Met’s roof garden, it’s charming and whimsical, a giant-child’s plaything. Even after all the trouble to get to the roof, even when the sun creates a glare on the lacquer, the sculpture feels utterly blithe. It makes me smile just to look at it.

Special exhibition at the Museum of Arts & Design, extended through April 27.

To celebrate finally completing an afghan on which I’d worked off and on (mostly off) for nearly six years, I decided to check out the embroidery exhibit at the Museum of Arts & Design. It was an absurd impetus—like visiting an exhibit on fine oil paintings because you finished painting the walls of your house with rollers—but I’ve been meaning to visit that museum for months (it’s less than a block away from my office), and I figured a silly rationale was as good as any.

Anyway, I’m glad I went because the exhibit surprised me. It was much more diverse than I had anticipated, in virtually every way possible: male artists as well as female, hailing from around the world, approaching the art form from a wide variety of perspectives, using a wide variety of materials. Despite the seemingly narrow focus of the exhibit, there was nothing monolithic about it.

Special exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden through November 18.

Metaphorically speaking, there’s something unsettling and sad about taking living beings, denying their natural beauty, and forcing them to conform to a standard not their own. But in this case, we’re talking about chrysanthemums (kiku in Japanese), not people, and the results are so extraordinary that even I can’t work myself into too much of a huff over thematic implications.

The botanical garden’s Kiku exhibit showcases traditional Japanese techniques of cultivating the colorful flowers. Plants are trained over a course of months to develop the blossoms for various established forms, supported by frameworks of wire, bamboo, and wood.

On display at Lincoln Center through July 29.

It’s such a simple concept: Director David Michalek filmed solo dancers at an incredible one thousand frames per second and then stretched a few seconds’ worth of footage over a full ten minutes. Each dancer appears several stories high, foregrounded against a stark black background, every moment given meaning and weight by the protracted pace.

Striking and rapturously beautiful, Slow Dancing is the kind of display that holds your attention for ages. (I sat outside for more than an hour before I realized how late it had become.) The dancers represent virtually every conceivable style and genre. Some images look like enchanted still photographs, so gradual and incremental are the movements. Dancers in other sequences move too quickly to create that illusion yet still appear other-worldly, the extraordinarily deliberate speed illuminating gestures and details that might otherwise have been lost in the frenzy.

A branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

If only the Cloisters weren’t quite so far uptown! The medieval art museum, a small branch of the mammoth Metropolitan, is an oasis of quiet—and not just in terms of volume. The stillness of the place, from the enclosed gardens to the chapel-like architecture, inspires a more transcendent quiet, the kind that permeates your skin and settles into your soul. If I didn’t have to take a forty-some-minute subway ride to get there, I might visit more often.

On display at Rockefeller Center through October 27.

Nearly every day for the past week, I’ve passed Sky Mirror, a gargantuan disc of stainless steel, on my way to eat lunch in Rockefeller Plaza. From what I’ve read, artist Anish Kapoor wants his sculpture to “explore the notion of void.” My first reaction, however, is an irrational fear that the twenty-three-ton behemoth, which leans backward without any visible means of support, will topple and crush the surrounding crowd.

Special exhibition at the Neue Galerie, extended through October 9.

No matter how many times I experience it, the dramatic difference between viewing a familiar painting in a book or on a computer screen and viewing it in person still startles me. Fixed images give you the illusion of having experienced a painting, but they don’t really show you how large or small the painting is or how the brushwork looks in three dimensions or how vibrant the colors are or how the painting changes when viewed from different angles. Being in the presence of a painting touches you in a way that simply seeing it cannot. I have to relearn that lesson every time I visit a museum, and this time I relearned it at the Neue Galerie.

I’d seen Gustav Klimt’s first portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer countless times alongside the numerous articles about its acquisition by the Neue Galerie, but the painting surprised me nonetheless. Photographs don’t do it justice. In person, the luster of the gold and silver and the bold accents of red and blue and green make it look almost mystical, like a religious icon.

Special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through September 4.

As anyone who has ever met me can attest, I am no fashionista: I dress not to stand out but to blend in. But once I realized that truly high-end fashion, the haute couture of runway shows, often isn't meant to be worn in any kind of real-world setting, I began to take more of an interest in fashion. Once I got past the knee-jerk, who-would-actually-wear-this-stuff? mindset and started thinking about couture as wearable art, it become much more intriguing.

The Met's special fashion exhibit, "AngloMania," is a case in point. Much of the garb on display is outrageous and completely unwearable, but it's marvelous not just despite that but also because of it. The exhibit revels in wild juxtapositions, the "tradition and transgression" of the exhibit's subtitle. Consequently, the curators have, for example, displayed one of Queen Victoria's black mourning dresses next to an Alexander McQueen dress with a ghoulish memento mori in the form of a "spine corset" (external aluminum ribs and vertebrae) designed by jeweler Shaun Leane.