Archives for June 2010

If you’ve been sitting in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art* six days a week, for seven or more hours a day, from Mar. 14 through May 31, what do you do when it’s all over?

I’m not sure what Marina Abramovic did on Monday night — probably collapsed — but last night, she went out to dinner. The “closing celebration” of The Artist Is Present was, seems to me, an unlikely event: It matched Marina with three luxury names: LVMH, Givenchy, and Sant Ambroeus, the upper East Side restaurant that has for years appealed to the art crowd.

LVMH and Givenchy sponsored the dinner at MoMA, and Sant Ambroeus — along with a dessert-maker called Kreemart — worked with Abramovic to create a special sweet: “the Gold Ball.” There was also another sweet treat, this one made by the Sant Ambroeus pastry chef — “a chocolate mold of Abramovic’s lips that were made from a cast of the artist’s face during a recent silent performance.”

I kid you not. These pictures are here as evidence.

Actually there’s a rationale, per the press representatives of Sant Ambroeus:

The Gold Ball recipe was given to Ms. Abramović by a Tibetan monastery. The practice of consuming a Gold Ball usually follows a long period of fasting and seclusion. In keeping with this tradition, the artist has planned a performance dessert piece in which the guests will apply a 24K golden leaf to their mouths before tasting the Gold Ball. By consuming the Gold Ball together with her guests, Marina Abramović marks the end of her longest performance ever.

Aside from Abramovic, among those in attendance were Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA’s P.S.1 Contemporary Art branch*, and Canadian artist Terence Koh — both pictured at left. Art advisor and Kreemart founder Raphael Castoriano; actor Christina Ricci, chef Daniel Boulod and socialite Fabiola Beracasa.

Word is that all — or most? — “covered their lips” with the chocolate creations “in homage” to Abramovic.

Here’s my previous take on Abramovic. 

Photo Credit: By Vera Miljkovic (bottom)

*A consulting client supports these organizations. 

 

Picasso and Braque Go To The Movies, Arne Glimcher’s new film, isn’t going to break any box office records, that’s for sure. I saw it over the weekend, and while I enjoyed much of it, the film felt padded to me — even though it clocks in at just 62 minutes.

The question here, though, is whether it will appeal to art-lovers. I think it’s worth the hour. And I say that after seeing the movie, in a hole-in-the-wall cinema in the Village (with a seating capacity of, oh, say 35? I should have counted but didn’t), with a screen no bigger than the largest wide-screen TVs. (And that says something about the appetite for art films.)

The film sets out to show how the creation of movies (especially those of the Lumiere Brothers), the invention of aviation, and other technological developments at the start of the 20th century (not African art or Iberian art) inspired Picasso and Braque to invent Cubism. It also throws in the Serpentine Dance of Loie Fuller (below), which is more convincing than it sounds — and is also gorgeous. Plus the use of fans.

Those elements work, and they fun to watch. Martin Scorsese, as narrator, bothered some critics, but not me. The scholars, including Bernice Rose, Natasha Staller, and John Richardson, were very articulate and enlightening — though their names are left out of the reviews. It was the interviews with artists that drag down the film. Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl are particularly inarticulate, but Chuck Close was hardly much better. Only the late Coosje van Bruggen aquitted herself well.

I say this not to be mean, but to raise a general point about visual-arts movies: too often, inho, they rely on long, rambling interviews with artists who paint, or draw, or do whatever their thing is, far better than they explicate.  

Before writing this post, I checked the movie’s ratings on my favorite review-aggregation site, MetaCritic.com (because it links to so many reviews). It gave the movie a score of 50, out of 100, based on just six reviews (it’s usually 20 or more). The scores ranged from 25 (from The New York Post) to 100 (from the Christian Science Monitor). No readers — whose ratings are listed separately, and are often more in tune with my likes and dislikes — have weighed in at this writing.

Rotten Tomatoes, btw, begs to differ.

Good for Glimcher for making this film, but I wish he hadn’t drawn it out with interviews that make it worse, not better.

Photo Credit: Frederick Glasier (bottom)