Displaying items by tag: Exhibitions

Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art moved into the digital realm on Monday with MOCAtv, the Museum’s YouTube channel devoted solely to contemporary art. In order to up the number of subscribers, MoCA will throw in a free three-month membership to the physical institution for anyone who subscribes to the channel between now and October 21^st.

MOCAtv offers viewers a glimpse into the artistic process via six mini-channels including Artist Video Projects, The Artist’s Studio, Art in the Streets, Art + Music, MOCA U, and YouTube Curated by. MOCAtv debuted with 10 short videos from artists such as Alexis Smith, Mark Bradford, and Robbie Conal that explore the artists’ relationships to their work as well as footage of them in the midst of creating. The Museum also plans to air interviews connected to upcoming exhibitions.

Peppered with advertising content from YouTube’s parent company, Google, MoCA will receive a chunk of the channel’s advertising revenue after Google takes back what the Museum owes them for the development, programming, and operation of MoCAtv.

MoCA and its director, Jeffrey Deitch, have suffered many woes lately. Critics claim Deitch has destroyed the Museum’s integrity during his two-year reign, focusing more on glitz and celebrity than the art itself. This past June curator Paul Schimmel left the museum after 22 years and took all of the artists on MoCA’s board with him including Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Barbara Kruger. While many suspected MoCA’s end was near, it doesn’t appear that Deitch or the Museum have given up just yet.

Three highly attended and widely acclaimed exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art generated about $781 million in spending by regional, national and foreign tourists this spring/summer season. Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, Tomas Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City, and The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde are to thank for the impressive chunk of change.

The Metropolitan has employed a number of audience studies in recent years to calculate the public economic impact of its special exhibition program. With a direct tax benefit of $78.1 to New York City, it appears the program is well worth its while.

In total, 339,838 visitors came to the Met to see Schiaparelli and Prada and 323,792 patrons came to see The Steins Collect, which will remain on view though November 4, 2012. At the time of the study, Tomas Saraceno on the Roof drew the largest crowd with 368,370 visitors.

Three champion British artists line up in London for a grand parade of exhibitions at the start of Olympic year. First out is David Hockney, whose “A Bigger Picture” (Jan. 21-April 9, 2012) will fill the main galleries of the Royal Academy almost entirely with new pictures.

In recent years, Hockney has been hard at work in a quiet corner of East Yorkshire. When asked to paint a portrait of the Queen, he replied that unfortunately he was, “very busy painting England actually, her country.”

He has not only been painting it, he has been drawing it on his iPad and experimenting with a hi-tech medium consisting of high-definition images taken by nine cameras pointing in slightly differing directions. The results, a sort of moving Cubist collage, will be unveiled to the world at the exhibition. The RA recommends booking in advance for this exhibition. Rumor has it that the projected attendance may exceed the previous record at the venue held by one of Hockney’s idols, Claude Monet.

Hockney wasn’t too busy to spend time a decade ago sitting for a portrait by his friend Lucian Freud. The exhibition “Lucian Freud Portraits” (Feb. 9-May 27) at the National Portrait Gallery is the first major showing of the artist’s work since his death last July. The restriction of the title is in reality not much of a limitation since to Freud a picture of just about anything was a portrait, certainly a depiction of a person wearing no clothes (to him, “a naked portrait”).

Personal Portrait

Had Freud lived, this exhibition would have marked his 90th birthday year. As it is, it will be the first opportunity since 2002 to see a retrospective in London of work by a painter who increasingly looks not only like one of the great U.K. artists, but among the most important painters of the past 50 years anywhere. I must, however, declare an interest, since one of the portraits is of me. I’m looking forward to seeing myself for the first time in some years.

Third contestant in this artistic triathlon is Damien Hirst, the first big museum retrospective of whose art will be at Tate Modern (April 4-Sept. 9). Included will be many celebrated -- or notorious, depending on your point of view -- pieces, among them “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” (1991) otherwise known as Hirst’s shark. In the Turbine Hall, meanwhile, will be the sinister yet sparkling “For the Love of God” (2007), the diamond-encrusted platinum skull which, even though there is controversy as to whether the original 50 million pound ($78.5 million) asking price was ever paid, must be the most costly memento mori in art history.

She’s almost 90 and still living very much in the present, quietly painting every day in her West Side studio. Yet Françoise Gilot — Picasso’s muse and lover and the mother of two of his children — is about to revisit her past.

In May, John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, together with Valentina Castellani, a director of the Gagosian Gallery, will present an exhibition that chronicles the years when Ms. Gilot and Picasso were together — from roughly 1943 through 1952 — living in Vallauris, a small hillside town near Cannes in the south of France. It will be the gallery’s fourth Picasso exhibition and will include paintings, sculptures, drawings, pottery and prints.

Ms. Gilot doesn’t mind dredging up what must seem like many lifetimes ago. “When you are old your life has different chapters,” she said the other day, standing near a colorful abstract painting perched on an easel.

“I was an artist before I ever met Picasso,” she emphatically explained. Yet those years “are very much a part of my life.”

Like other blockbuster shows that are proliferating among some of today’s most prosperous galleries, Mr. Richardson believes the exhibition will be an eye-opener because “nobody realizes the tremendous importance of Françoise to Picasso during that whole period.”

The show, which will open at Gagosian’s newly renovated Madison Avenue gallery, is poised to generate as much excitement as the other Picasso shows that Mr. Richardson has masterminded. (The first, “Picasso: Mosqueteros,” in 2009 drew more than 100,000 visitors, a figure more normally associated with a museum exhibition.)

And the show, like all the others, will be a costly undertaking that involves getting loans from museums, publishing a lavish catalog with scholarly essays and bringing in an architect to redesign the gallery. It’s a lot of work and expense. Often dealers say nothing is for sale; generally, however, one or two works are available — at the right price — making these shows profitable after all.

Larry Gagosian says he believes that either way, the headaches were worth it. “Now we get offered all kinds of Picassos,” he said. “Everything from a print worth $4,000 to, well, the sky’s the limit.”

With his network of 11 galleries around the world, Mr. Gagosian is by far the most visible of all the dealers presenting these kinds of crowd-pleasing shows. But other blue-chip galleries including Acquavella and Pace have been presenting them on and off for decades. “I’ll never forget in the early ’70s when we had a Matisse show,” William Acquavella recalled. “We had people waiting on line in the pouring rain.”

His gallery, just two blocks north of Gagosian’s Madison Avenue headquarters, is attracting crowds right now with “Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism,” which opened on Oct. 12. The show, which was organized by Dieter Buchhart, an Austrian curator, includes 42 paintings, many on loan from museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Tate in London. “It’s good advertising,” Mr. Acquavella said. “Braque is an amazing artist and hasn’t really gotten his due.”