At the Square Vortex Café...

... you can get sucked right in.

"Woman puts the 'ass' in Picasso at Met."

Teaser on the front page at the Daily News for this article about a woman falling into a big Rose Period Picasso and ripping it.

"Respect the vision of Frank Lloyd Wright and look to the future and forget the towers.”

Do you know about the Lamp House? What do you think of this proposal to raze the surrounding buildings and construct a giant glass box all around it?

Brenda Konkel champions the buildings slated for destruction:

[She] said what makes the Lamp House charming is the fact that it’s surrounded by other historic homes, in a largely intact historic neighborhood. “Coming in and tearing out six houses just destroys the neighborhood,” she said. “Moving the Lamp House is insane. Part of what’s special about the Lamp House is that it was put in the middle of the block on purpose.”

Here's her blog post showing those other houses, which are really ordinary. But I guess that's the idea. The Lamp House looks distinctive because of the contrast to the other old residences. Putting all that new glass around it would create a completely different effect.

But is that so wrong? I'm thinking of the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. Yes, it's radically out of context, but that's what museums always do to things. The real question is whether the recontextualization is good.

Obama at the museum

Background.

Closeup:

The ancient cell-phone call.

At the Met, the statues are posing like people:



The photographer, Rick Lee, gave me permission to reproduce that image here. Please don't reproduce it without his permission. You can see the full size picture and others on the same theme at the link.

Ancient images.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Greek and Roman gallery, with a fisheye lens.

Glass enclosures.

In the Oceania room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

ADDED: Since commenters seem unfamiliar with human costumery, let me add this picture I took a few weeks ago at the Museum of Natural History. (These are African.)

Late afternoon in the Oceania room.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Pictures from the Khmer Dynasty room.

Photos taken yesterday at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the Asian Art wing.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What is more charming than artists drawing sculptures?

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, Sunday.

A stray devil.

13th century stained glass from the Bourges cathedral in France. Seen yesterday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sitting at the counter, having an encounter...

I'm blogging from LaGuardia airport, waiting for the day's one nonstop flight from NYC to Madison. This morning, I tossed my bags in a cab and made it uptown to the Metropolitan Museum where I took a hundred photographs and then got in line at the restaurant to order up my one meal of the day.

I got to jump the line by agreeing to take a seat at the counter. I was going to write some notes for my Tuesday column, but the woman on the next stool struck up a conversation. It turns out she's an artist, Lynn Pulsifer. Check out her awesome pastels:



She leaves. I do my notes. I drink a lot of black coffee, then collect my things to go. Working my way to the exit, I go in an exhibit the back way. Wow! What is this? I'm blown away! It's "Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s." No photos from me. You can't do photography at a current exhibition, which is an acceptable rule. It would have been annoying. The show was really crowded. (Tomorrow's the last day.)

Here are some images on the Met's website. I especially loved Otto Dix:



The intense caricatures sealed themselves onto my retinas so that when I started looking around at the people in the gallery, they seemed all to have the look of the decadent Germans in the pictures.

I absolutely must buy the catalogue:



High on art, manic, I traipse through the museum store and find myself spending $300 on two scarves. The chartreuse one with photo-realistic, pop art flowers called out to me. Then another, pale gold and dripping with glass beads, cried that it needed me too.

Now, I'm at the airport. There's WiFi. I'm not manic anymore, but I feel great. Soon I'll be on the plane. Deprived of access, I'm going to type out two or three column ideas I have and see which one tells me it wants to be the Tuesday.

ARGGHHH: It's quarter to 10 and I'm still at the airport. Yes, the flight is non-stop, but so far it's also been non-start. I'm just glad there's been WiFi, electrical outlets, and consistent reason to believe that we will make it home tonight.

MORE: We were waiting for a plane and a crew that needed to go through the Cleveland airport, where this happened:

A commuter plane carrying more than 70 people ran off the end of a snowy runway and pierced a fence after landing at the Cleveland airport Sunday, officials said. No injuries were reported.

The plane came to a stop more than 150 feet past the end of the runway, said Thonnia Lee, a spokeswoman for Delta Air Lines Inc. The engines were partially buried in snow and the tip of the plane's nose was resting on a roadway the airport uses to get to perimeter buildings...

The airport was closed for about an hour and a half and some planes were diverted to other cities....

In art, either you're in or you're out.

The arbiter of art, Janson's History of Art. With a new edition, reputations rise and fall. (I like the Heidi Klum-style headline on the article!)

The new edition drops not only Whistler's portrait of his mother but also evicts several other longtime residents, like Domenichino, the Baroque master, and Louis Le Nain, whose work is in the Louvre.

The sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac, for example, has been erased with a vengeance; even a portrait by another artist of Roubiliac posing with his work has been dropped. And some full-page reproductions that had become permanent fixtures — like the Metropolitan Museum of Art's van Eyck diptych, "The Crucifixion, the Last Judgment" — have been replaced with others seen to be more representative of an artist's work....

Stephen F. Eisenman, a professor of art history at Northwestern University who described himself as a longtime critic of Janson, welcomed many of the changes. "It's clearly a liberal version of a cold-war classic that will pass muster in most of the U.S.," he said.

But he added that it would probably never regain the dominance it once had, simply because the whole idea of a book like it, or other supposedly all-inclusive surveys like "Gardner's Art Through the Ages," first published in 1926, had become outdated.

"The main problem, I think, is that there's no longer a general belief that there exists a single canon for art that should be taught to all students," he said.

[Frima Fox Hofrichter, chairwoman of the history of art and design department at Pratt Institute], who has taught from Janson for many years, counters that teachers and students need a book to use as a starting point and basic guide to what should be considered important. But she said she had also often "taught against" Janson during her career, which leaves her in a strange predicament.

"Now," she said, "I'll have only myself to teach against."

You may think that last quote sounds silly, but I know exactly what Hofrichter means. There is good reason to want a very traditional presentation in the text so you have something to critique in class, some value to add. If the text itself is the critique of the tradition, it makes you passive, stuck with the editor's critique and forced to help students try to understand what the tradition was that this editor was reacting to, which can be confusing and annoying and nowhere near as fascinating as the editor imagines. In this case, however, Hofrichter is one of the new editors! But the old text was falling out of favor, and the publisher needed to revive it.

"5 Films About Christo."

Even though I'm avoiding buying DVDs the way I did back when they first came out and it was possible to buy everything I was interested in, there are still some things I must buy as soon as I see they exist. "5 Films About Christo" is one of the things in that category. I love the Maysles Brothers documentaries (like this), and I'm also interested in the artist Christo. (Interested enough to consider planning a trip to New York just to be able to see "The Gates" in Central Park next February. I saw an exhibit about the project at the Metropolitan Museum, which is still on view and will be until July 25th.)



Here's a nice short review of it in the Onion AV Club. An excerpt:

Each film is rife with inherent drama, as Christo and Jeanne-Claude battle bureaucracy, weather, and countless other variables endemic in mounting projects of such size and scope. In Christo, the Maysles find a fascinating and dynamic protagonist, a mercurial, lanky, heavily accented, intermittently incomprehensible iconoclast whose Coke-bottle glasses, long black hair, and intense demeanor make him look like a cross between Kramer from Seinfeld and a deranged monk. In attitude and bearing, Christo is like a religious fanatic whose religion is art. In the early films especially, Christo interacts with drawling, homespun Americans who must see him as some sort of space alien from the Planet Art.

Views from the hotel and in the American Wing.

Here are two views from my hotel window (note the flag is at half staff):











And here are two images from the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the first is a detail the second an Art Deco tomb effigy):