New York City is often called the art capital
of the United States.
It is home to more than 15 museums of modern
and contemporary art, and to hundreds of galleries
and exhibition spaces, each of which display
unique collections or aspects of artists’
visions.
• In addition to formal spaces where art
may be viewed and possibly purchased, hundreds
of communities, collectives, foundations and
individual artists foster and keep the arts
alive and ever-changing in public-access spaces
throughout the city.
• Even city departments take part; the Department
of Transportation (DOT) regularly calls for
and implements proposals to create art on
concrete street barriers, temporary wall and
fence structures, and more.
 
In a discussion of modern and contemporary
art, though, it is often useful to look, first,
to the formal spaces, to exhibits which are
catalogued, pieces which remain accessible
for ongoing study, reflection, and discussion.
(approx. 1 minute of silence for reflection, questions, etc.)
Museums are defined by their collections.
Curators are always mindful of historical
precedents as they look ahead to future developments.
• New York’s Museum of Modern Art (known
as MoMA), the Guggenheim, The Rubin, the New
Museum for Contemporary Art, and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s Breuer branch (called “The
MET Breuer”)…
• … and numerous other museums in New
York City all offer exhibitions, performances,
artist commissions, residencies, and educational
initiatives, spaces and programs for public
exploration
• … which reach around the globe for their
collections.
These museums focus on art of the 20th and
21st centuries, but like New York’s other
museums which focus on the 19th century and
earlier, their exhibitions and events encourage
and reveal new ideas and unexpected connections
across time and cultures.
• While museum collections are generally
purchased or obtained by exchange or loan,
• …their curators seek to keep the museums
on the cusp of innovation,
• …and support the emerging talents, ideas,
and concepts that will inform the future’s
designed and perceived environment.
Often, art patronage has been associated with
privilege, with the plasticity of exclusivity.
At the same time, people, especially artists
and visionaries, often view human existence:
being able to think about the past, to experience
and form memories in the present, to imagine
the future — life itself — as a huge privilege.
The elasticity of creativity, of nurturing
imagination, of changing forms, aspects, and
perspectives — which everyone can access,
and utilize, but which some few can transform
into visual, performing, or interactive combinations
and representations of vision plus reality:
this is art.
Art can inspire conversations, enable appreciation
of other’s points-of-view, and form connections.
• But is art limited to orderly conversations
between artists and audiences, a type of prolonged
participation, sometimes in the hushed cleanliness
of a museum, in the quiet intimacy of a gallery?
• Can art also be enjoyed during a moment
of clarity in a bustling market place, transit
hub, or sprayed as graffiti on some dilapidated
wall in the “built environment” which
people and artists share in the increasingly
desperate quest for space?
• Is a creative work “art” if no one
sees it?  • Is a creative work
“art” if it is
then mass-produced?
• Can art be tweeted—and shared through
social media, across the globe in the blink
of a byte?
This was one of hundreds of artists’ visual
deconstructions of a social media campaign
against violence and injustice in New York
and elsewhere.
It was viewed globally, and printed as part
of interactive displays. Is it political?
Is it philosophical?  Is it ... art?
(silence for reflection)
As in much of the world, in New York, the
marketplace of ideas and the arts is often
a combined space.
• At MoMA, for example, during the first
100 days of Donald Trump’s new US presidential
administration, the artists who created For
Freedoms (which uses art to encourage discussions
of core democratic values), will hold an open
Town Hall meeting this week (Friday, 17
March 2017)
• …an event to discuss changes to the
state of art funding, run by artists with
a fierce commitment to freedom of expression.
In modern times, art is more than a curated
collection, cut out of time and set apart
for viewing.
• As in many cities and cultural centers
around the world, in New York there are always classes and
interactive sessions for those
interested in creating art, viewing art, discussing art
• there are numerous galleries which exhibit
masterworks and contemporary collections;
• there are special art shows in public
spaces, and living art events in parks, and
on streets.
There is even art featuring examples of everyday
life—
• stools topped with bicycle wheels,
• paintings of soup cans
• and water heaters,
• replicas of water towers, and...  • fur-covered tea cups.
(silence for reflection)
 
 
(the fur covered tea cup, with saucer and spoon)
While the term “Modern” art is generally
used in reference to art created between the
1860s and 1970s, the galleries and museums
of New York City continue, of course,
• to collect and curate contemporary art,
• a period ranging roughly from the 1970s
to the present,
• and encompassing post-modern, fusions
of science, technologies and the plastic arts,
• and digital media and interactive arts.
• For example, MoMA’s Department of Architecture
and Design acquired the @ symbol for its collection
in 2010.
In a building which itself was conceived to
embody “the Modern,” and which showcases
the transformational architecture of Frank
Lloyd Wright, the establishment of the Solomon
R Guggenheim Museum (NY)
• played a role in urban regeneration,
• and shows the financial potential of the
cultural sector for economic development—
• replaying a concept of using museums as
magnets for tourism and inward investment,
• as well as creating a space of light and
life, where art may be experienced.
• While art and cultural spaces may indeed
assist in fostering urban regeneration,
• The Guggenheim focuses on its ongoing
exhibitions of Non-Objective art, modern and
contemporary art,
• and continues to inspire exploration,
introspection, and reflection, despite the
“non-objective” nature of its many works.
Accumulating art can be a strategic investment.
Building a collection can also be seen as
a cultural mission.
But the process itself can be captivating
— collectors who are able to invest in art
find the race to discover and obtain the works
of obscure or emerging artists to be rewarding
in itself.
• Despite the sometimes huge sums of money
involved, those who can afford to participate
in commissioning, offering sponsorship, or
simply purchasing works of art find it a thrilling
pursuit.
• Some share their collections through Foundations
or Museums, in Corporate venues or Libraries,
or in other spaces
• — and some construct private, secure
places where their precious works of art are
displayed only for themselves, or perhaps
for family and friends.
• As elsewhere in the world, there are several
of these places in New York as well.
Acknowledged as a famous collector and patron
of the arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim once bought
a coveted painting out from under his own
niece, Peggy, who was a collector and conservator
in her own right,
• … but he then displayed it for everyone
to see, in the Guggenheim collections, where
it has remained since.
• Asked why he was so interested in seemingly
pointless “modern” art, Guggenheim once
said, “Everyone was telling me that ‘this
modern stuff was the bunk.’
So as I have always been interested in things
people told me were the bunk, I decided that,
therefore, there must be beauty in modern
art…
I got to feel those pictures so deeply that
I wanted them to live with me.”
Since we all just celebrated International
Woman’s Day, let’s look, briefly, at four
very different Modern interpretations of the
female in the visual arts, starting with a
piece in the Guggenheim collection.
• This is “Little French Girl (The First
Step [III],” an oak sculpture (with a pine
base added by the Guggenheim in 1953 ) carved
by Constantin Brancusi between 1914 and 1918.
• One of the early modernists, Constantin
Brancusi was born on the 19th of February,
1876, in Hobitza, Romania, where wood carving
is a popular form of art.
Brancusi’s sculpture displays a constant
tension between the abstraction he learned
as he progressed in his art, and the representation
he had viewed in wood carvings as a child.
• He strips the lines of his sculptures
to capture the essence of the form.
The long legs portray knobby knees—suggesting
the statue is of a little girl.
A few wavy lines around the middle evoke memories
of the swirling skirts of a playing child.
In an abstraction of form, Brancusi elongates
the girls neck, and adds serrated lines, which
may allude to African sculptures
and art forms.
• Brancusi studied with the great sculptor
Rodin, but famously said “nothing can grow
in the shade of a tall tree.”
Brancusi broke away from the traditional stone
and marble mediums of 19th century sculpture,
to create his own new form—a combination
of wood-carving he learned as a child in Romania,
with the influences of his studies and relationships
in Europe, and in Africa, and 20th century
thinking.
• Even when working in marble or other mediums
beyond wood, Brancusi always carved all his
sculptures himself—rather than making a
model to be cast or executed by others.
• Brancusi endeavored, in his art, to idealize
the aesthetic form, integrate architecture/sculpture/and
furniture, and capture the poetic evocation
of spiritual thought.
• In capturing the merest essence of line
in carving Little French Girl, Brancusi uses
the wavy lines of hair to offset the girl’s
face from the line of her feet, and prompts
viewers to wonder what she was thinking, and
where she was going.
This oil painting is titled Woman, I . It
was painted by Willem de Kooning (an American,
born in the Netherlands, in 1904).
He painted the canvas in 1952.
He painted it several times, in fact.
The painting is quite large: 6’ 3 7/8”
x 4’ 10” (192.7 x 147.3 cm).
• MoMA acquired the painting in 1953, stating:
“The Committee found the picture quite frightening,
but I felt that it had intense vitality and
liked the quality of the color”
• Willem de Kooning’s Woman, I was the
first of a series of six oil-on-canvas paintings
entered upon a single female figure that de
Kooning had worked on from 1950 – 1953.
He once threw this painting out, then retrieved
it several weeks later, to rework the colors
and the lines.
• Despite the abstract nature of his painting,
de Kooning did agree with some of the old
Masters’ traditions and preferences.
De Kooning worked almost exclusively with
oil paints, once declaring that “Flesh is
the reason oil paint was invented” ////(Marcia
Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Subjects:
Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly
Abstraction (Cabridge: MIT Press, 2004), 72.)
The first known use of oil paint is attributed
to Northern Europe in the 12th Century
• The surface of Woman, I presents a primer
on the physical possibilities of paint – ranging
from opaque to translucent, from rough to
smooth, from thick layers to whisper-thin.
De Kooning spent nearly two years on this
one painting, preparing huge quantities of
paint, altering colors and textures, scraping-down
and re-painting of whole sections of the canvas.
• De Kooning once stated that representations
of woman as “the idol, the Venus, the nude”
(The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights
(New York?
The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 206) summarized
the entire history of the use of the feminine
in art.
• In Woman, I he both acknowledges and subverts
such conventions.
Composed of sweeping brushstrokes of white,
gray, yellow, orange, blue, green, and pink,
roughly outlined in black, the figure of the
woman sits strongly in the center of the 6’
x 5’ painting, in the midst of vigorous
surrounding brushstrokes of a similar palette.
Wide-open eyes command almost a third of her
face, and long teeth are contained within
an almost lipless mouth.
• Stylized arms emerge from broad shoulders
and cradle an ample bosom; feet protrude from
beneath an amalgam of colors which may be
the seated woman’s skirt.
Despite her size, she appears flattened out,
pressed against the surface of the painting.
• Even so, Woman, I , the opening work in
the series of six, continues to receive the
most attention.
The painting’s flamboyance seems to embody
the artist’s claim: “Beauty becomes petulant
to me.
I like the grotesque.
It’s more joyous.”
/////(Willem de Kooning, quoted in John Elderfield,
“Woman to Landscape,” in de Kooning, a
Retrospective, John Elderfield (New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 277)
Put to canvas in 1907, nearly 50 years before
de Kooning’s Woman I, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,
(The Women of Avignon) by Pablo Picasso (a
Spanish painter who lived from 1881 – 1973),
remains exceedingly controversial in the art
world.
Crafted in strongly colored oils painted on
a huge 6’ x 7’ 8” (243.9 x 233.7 cm)
canvas,
• Les Demoiselles d’Avignon traveled 10
times between Picasso’s studios and various
collections, until it found its ongoing home
at MoMA.
All of this travel left its mark on the painting,
and it has undergone several conservation
efforts — the most recent completed in 2004.
• Picasso was a prolific artist, and emphatic
free thinker, who worked with many media,
from paintings to sketches to sculptures,
exploring the expression of form through the
lines of Cubism, and using colors in novel
ways.
• Artists creating works ahead of their
“time” often have to wait for society
to catch up to their visions.
And Picasso broke some boundaries when he
created this painting.
In fact, some critics still dispute the merits
of the painting.
Just ten years ago, on the occasion of the
100th anniversary of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,
Jonathan Jones wrote “Works of art settle
down eventually, become respectable.
But, 100 years on, [Les Demoiselles d’Avignon]
is still so new, so troubling, it would be
an insult to call it a masterpiece.”
(Jonathan Jones, “Pablo’s Punks,” The
Guardian, January 9, 2007)
De Koonig was born three years before Picasso
painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, ten years
before Brancusi carved Little French Girl.
The next artist was born one year after De
Koonig painted Woman, I.
And now we can look at one of the full-length
Chromogenic color prints of contemporary American
artist Cindy Sherman , as seen in her 1988
– 1990 collection “History Portraits”
• While the photographic and film mediums
she uses present a return to realistic forms,
Sherman seeks abstractions and incongruities
of expression and context within her work
to engage viewers.
• In these photographic works, Sherman herself
serves as model, set-dresser, and photographer.
• She investigates the representation of
individuals in Old Master and historical portrait
paintings of the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo
and Neoclassical periods.
• Using her own historical research, constructing
sets and props in addition to her costume
and makeup, Sherman alludes to canonical paintings
and transforms herself into the male or female
figure central to each work.
• In Untitled #228 , Sherman portrays the
biblical figure Judith, who is said to have
rescued the Israelites from invading Assyrian
general Holofernes by seducing and then beheading
him.
• Using her camera to capture her deliberately
placid face after the presumed violence of
beheading is in keeping with ambiguity which
Sherman uses to build her portrayals, seeking
to draw the reactions and perceptions of viewers
into the scene itself.
Of course, in New York, as elsewhere, museums
are not the only places showcasing art which
intrigues and involves viewers.
• Starting this week, at the Greene Naftali
gallery, Paul Chan’s RHI ANIMA, a performative
sculpture of inflatable air dancers is on
display.
• Elizabeth Dee’s gallery is currently
exhibiting the refrigerators, bureaus, shelves,
and flats which have been transformed into
art through the work of Joan Wallace.
• Also in the Chelsea District, Hauser & Wirth
New York, 22nd Street is presenting “Serialities”
– a group exhibition of many artists, exploring
ways in which these artists examine and portray
linear and non-linear narratives through iterations
of photographs, drawings, and/or sculptures.
• And returning to the medium of pigment
painted on canvas, the Fredericks & Freiser
gallery is presenting Lamar Peterson’s collection
of canvases which he collectively titled “A
Self-Portrait” highlighting the concerns
of his development as a young black man in
troubled times of violence.
The vases of plastic flowers which border
many of the paintings in this series provide
an elegiac, or funereal aspect with which
he punctuates his artistic interpretations.
All these galleries are in the Chelsea district
of New York City.
In the late 1990s, New York City’s visual
arts community gradually moved from the high
prices in SoHo into Chelsea to find better
rent, converting factories and warehouses
into hundreds of large art studios and gallery
spaces.
• Now, with the gentrification and rising
prices in Chelsea since 2011, many galleries
and artists have moved again, settling into
Chinatown, the Bowery, and New York’s Lower
East Side.
• Galleries on the Lower East Side tend
to stay open on Sundays, to attract collectors
who spend their Saturday afternoons in downtown
New York, and in the Chelsea galleries.
• Marianne Boesky’s Lower East Side gallery
is showing the bold, wall-spanning serial-chromatic
prints of Pier Paolo Calzolari.
• Another gallery owner in the neighborhood,
Richard Taittinger, also stays open to collectors
and casual visitors on Sunday, but does not
worry if few customers emerge.
He points to the hundreds of thousands of
“likes” Miley Cirus’s Instagram picture
of a pink tongue sculpture by Frances Goodman,
displayed in his gallery in 2016, received.
Taittinger’s is currently displaying a tribute
to Nassos Daphnis and minimalist artists of
the mid-20th century.
• Around the corner, The Hollis Taggart
galleries are showing a collection of Alex
Kanevsky, titled : Some Paintings In No Particular
Style, a group of multilayered works combining
focus on the figure in abstract space, but
rendering spaces to allow the combination
of paint, the painted subjects, and Kanevsky’s
imprecise and imagined landscapes and backgrounds
evoke familiar and unfamiliar narrative dialogues
with viewers.
Art spaces, and artists, maneuver in a fluid
world which hovers between real-time, the
past, and the possible, between built-space,
occupied-space, imagined space, and, now,
virtual space.
The multi-media culture of today is extremely
visual, extremely interactive, and the art
it creates is not passing unnoticed.
• Just a few months ago, in October 2016,
MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design
acquired Shi-ge-taka Ku-ri-ta’s original
176 digital emoji for ongoing exhibition.
• In addition, MoMA has been building its
collection of online video games (including
World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Star Wars the
Old Republic, Age of Conan, Eve Online, and
the old standard, Dark Age of Camelot and
other globally-recognized MMOs) since 2012.
• Massively Multiplayer Online games currently
produce more than $90 billion in online and
mobile-device game-related revenues, in addition
to the free-play games available, and often
display wonderful representations of historic
and cutting-edge imagine-scape art.
What about art that predates chronicled history?
Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon Cave Paintings
have been discovered in America, and all over
the world.
Scientists and anthropologists are now postulating
that the cutting-edge techniques used in much
of the Modern and Contemporary art period
actually were introduced thousands of years
ago.
• The Paleolithic period Cave Paintings
in Lascaux, France, are estimated to be up
to 18,000 years old, and are part of the UNESCO
World Heritage Sites list,
• The cave contains some 2,000 images of
animals, humans, and abstract signs.
One of the most famous images is of a bull,
almost 17 feet long — the largest animal
in cave art discovered so far.
• The Lascaux caves have been closed to
the public since 1963.
Despite numerous conservation efforts, the
caves remain sealed to most visitors.
(Conservation efforts; Google Images).
However, France has created a $94million full-scale
walk-through replica of the ancient cave art,
which was unveiled December 10th, 2016.
That is about 6 billion, 505 million, 912
thousand, 581 KGS.
Although there are few natural caves to be
found in New York City, America has its own
networks of caves preserving the drawings
and artifacts of prehistoric artists.
• Regardless of continent of origin, the
concerns of these ancestral cave artists,
these fellow-walkers upon Earth, do not seem,
in viewing the art historically, scientifically,
artistically, or simply as a fellow human
being, so very different from ours.
• Imagine, the first time a human thought
to put dots of clay, smears of minerals or
organic matter on a tablet or wall, or used
a rock to scratch groups of lines, to portray
animals, to visualize a concept, to create
art.
• The techniques of applying dots and lines
to represent an artist’s visions have been
recreated in the “modern” period — the
pointillism of the impressionists, the line
figures of cubists and abstract artists…
and in the cartooning, and emojicon of contemporary
artists
In modern times, artists still seek “caves”
and walls to use as canvas for their creativity.
There is a huge urbex (urban explorer) community
in New York, many of whom seek the fluid displays
of paint, textile and other street art created
on various (usually abandoned) subway tunnels,
platforms, street barriers and walls.
• Photographers Martha Cooper and Henry
Chalfant found their niche capturing graffiti
art created on the trains of New York City.
Their classic book Subway Art was first published
in 1984, and received its third release in
2016.
• In October 2010, some 103 artists from
around the world traveled to part of the abandoned
South Fourth Street Line to create “The
Underbelly Project” of street art inside
the station.
• In 2016, street artist Phil America installed
a series of flags as a tribute, memory and
reminder against gun violence in America in
an abandoned subway tunnel deep under Nevins
Street.
• New York City’s Department of Transportation
(or DOT) partners with community-based organizations
and artists to transform ordinary NYC streets
and street barriers with murals, projects,
and sculptures.
• 100 Gates connects local businesses with
artists who showcase their colorful transformations
of 100 metal pull-down gates in the Lower
East Side.
• The “Graffiti Hall of Fame” and many
building walls in El Barrio, East Harlem,
are touted as great places to see current
street art in New York.
Bacteria have been in existence at least as
long as the cave paintings, and, at the School
of Visual Arts, in the Chelsea district of
New York City, students at the Bio Art Lab
study the use of bio-materials for art projects
which explore the biomorphism of microbes
into visual art-scapes.
So what happens when old myths, new technologies
like microbial mapping, genetic engineering,
and artificial intelligence are coupled with
the arts?
• What about the role of media, of traditional
humanism and creativity in 21st century literacies?
Science and technology are rapidly becoming
the credo of Singularity, global learning
and civilization.
• What will happen when computers and robotics
push humans out of the job market, creating
what some think will be a massive new “useless
class”?
• Will human-endeavor, creativity and the
arts enjoy greater popularity—or will human
arts be replaced by the precision of requirement,
and human artists be replaced by the efficiency
of artificially-intelligent robot-productions?
• In New York City, such topics are discovered
and discussed daily, at public art learning
groups in community spaces like the 92nd Street
Y , where people can experience art, view
art, create art, and talk about art — tracing
emotions and events and complex paths they
have traveled; the people, the unexpected,
the unknowable which they have encountered
along the way.
Art can provide precious bits of space and
time which enable people to notice, and forge,
common bonds as we scurry through the tumult
of daily life.
• Creating and experiencing works of art
can help make those enduring local and global
human challenges, natural disasters and man-made
crises seem less distant, “more human”
• … fostering empathy and reminding us
that we are all immigrants in our own ways,
within in the larger scope of humanity
• … and that the “borders” of citizenship,
human endeavor, technologies, and the arts
are actually fluid, and easily shared.
• In New York, as in most metropolitan centers
of the world, people struggle with ambiguity,
isolation, economic, educational, and cultural
divisions daily
• … but, happily, people also achieve
new technological and artistic heights almost
every day.
• The art scene in New York City offers
an ever-changing glimpse at the history, present-achievements,
and future possibilities of this journey through
human development which we all share.
