Hasta La Ideas

If, for some reason, you’ve ever wanted to see the Guggenheim sink into the ocean, this week you’ll finally get that opportunity. On Thursday the 14th, the artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster will stage two performances of T.1912, a piece that will convert the museum’s rotunda into “a site-specific staged audience experience” recreating the sinking of the Titanic. The performance marks the 99th anniversary of the ship’s tragic end and Gonzalez-Foerster, who has a history of making interesting and sometimes unsettling large-scale performance pieces, will try and recreate the event using a mix of installed pieces, lighting, audience participation and a performance of composer Gavin Bryars‘ 1969 piece, The Sinking of the Titanic. Here’s a bit of the description of the plans for the evening from the NY Observer‘s great piece about the project:

Throughout the 45-minute Titanic piece, ushers will circulate the audience in different directions — moving higher or lower once the “iceberg” tears into the hull, albeit musically. About halfway through, “there will be a movement where the audience is ushered further onto a different ramp and …there’s a big move,” Mr. Fabius said. The artist was secretive about how she will portray drowning, revealing only that “it’s the field where music plays the strongest role.”

The music will also resuscitate the most visceral survivor memories, such as when one man said the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg was like someone tearing a long strip of cotton. To simulate this, a guitarist attaches a piece of masking tape to the fingerboard, turns up the amplifier and then slowly peels it back. Another passenger remembered that the cries of people drowning sounded like 100,000 football players in an English stadium — a roar Mr. Bryars recorded for the piece.

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Hot off the heals of being at the forefront in the museum industry last year in launching mobile apps, last last week the Museum of Modern Art kicked off another, this time creating an online marketplace for their books. The MoMA Books App is available for thev iPad and includes a wide assortment of the books released through the museum’s publishing arm, including a number of out-of-print selections. While you’ll not find everything they’ve published, as there likely have to be new contracts drawn up and a series of legal matters to wade through, the museum has promised that the total number of titles will continue to grow. The app itself is free, but of course, the books aren’t. If you aren’t the type who wants to own physical copies of fancy art books to leave out on your shelves and coffee table to show off how smart and cultured you are, and instead want to show off how smart, cultured and technologically savvy you are, here’s your favorite new app to spend money inside of. Here are some details from the press release:

MoMA e-books preserve the original design and layout of the print book while enabling users to zoom in on superb, high-resolution reproductions of artwork for close study of details. The App also allows users to bookmark their favorite pages for future reference. As more MoMA e-books become available, the App will automatically prompt users to update their browsing shelf to show new titles.

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Where can you attend a conference keynoted by architect Rem Koolhaas, sample locally brewed kombucha under a colorful canopy, take a flashlight tour of metal plates engraved by Italian masters, see Chinatown by bike, check out a new mural by Mary Heilmann, and leave with a rooftop garden ready for planting? The Festival of Ideas for the New City, a collaborative initiative announced today by the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the hundreds of downtown New York organizations that have signed on to participate.

“Three years ago, when we moved to the Bowery, we witnessed a dramatic transformation of this neighborhood,” said New Museum director Lisa Phillips at a press briefing held this morning at the institution’s SANAA-designed home (which somehow manages to look even cooler beneath a steady drizzle). Conversations between Museum staffers and neighboring organizations including the Architectural League, the Cooper Union, the Drawing Center, and Storefront for Art and Architecture soon developed into the two-year planning process for a festival that would, according to Phillips, “harness the power of the creative community to reimagine the city.”

Artists, writers, architects, engineers, designers, urban farmers, and the public are invited to take part in the free festival, which will run from May 4 through May 8 in locations around downtown Manhattan. Things kick off with a three-day slate of symposia, lectures, and workshops exploring “big ideas that change the course of a city.” In addition to Koolhaas, the organizers have secured computer scientist Jaron Lanier and Antanas Mockus, a former mayor of Bogotá, Columbia, to give keynote addresses. Other panelists include architect Elizabeth Diller, Urban Genome Project founder Pedro Reyes, and Pennsylvania politician John Fetterman, who was recently dubbed “Mayor of Rust” by The New York Times Magazine. “Interestingly enough, he’ll be driving here, which I think is kind of great,” said New Museum curator Richard Flood at today’s press briefing.
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Back in early January, and to no one’s surprise, it was announced that the Louvre had once again bested the competition and retained its title as “World’s Most Popular Museum.” Now the rest of the figures have come out, thanks to the just-released annual breakdown of visitor numbers by The Art Newspaper (pdf). The Louvre, it turns out, was ahead of the British Museum by nearly three million visitors, which isn’t very surprising at all, as that’s now been happening for years, but it’s always interesting none the less. Besides the total visitor count, the Newspaper includes a bevy of other categories, from the Top 30 Exhibitions (Japan won four of the top five slots) and the Contemporary Top Ten (Maria Abramovic‘s run at the MoMA took the prize, despite having much fewer than that same museum’s Tim Burton retrospective, but had a higher daily visitor count). In short, reading through the rankings is an annual treat, definitely one of the best ways to kill an hour or so early on a Wednesday morning. Here’s the top ten, with their total visitors numbers:

1. Louvre 8,500,000

2. British Museum 5,842,138

3. Metropolitan Museum of Art 5,216,988

4. Tate Modern 5,061,172

5. National Gallery (London) 4,954,914

6. National Gallery of Art 4,775,114

7. Museum of Modern Art 3,131,238

8. Centre Pompidou 3,130,000

9. National Museum of Korea 3,067,909

10. Musee d’Orsay 2,985,510

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Now roughly two years removed from the high-profile controversy that almost saw it shut down for good, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University is closing down. However, unlike last time, it isn’t because the school wants to stop paying its operating expenses and wants to sell off all of its art collection to pay bills. Instead, it’s just a temporary closure so the museum can undergo some major renovations as it prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary this fall. All of the rehab is being paid for by hotel tycoons and a pair of ARTnews‘ “top 200 art collectors in the world,” Sandra and Gerald S. Fineberg. The Rose is set to close at the end of April, with temporary exhibitions and openings planned during the work. Here’s the full list of what’s to be done:

Replacement of the front curtain wall with new, more energy-efficient glass

Creation of a vestibule area to better maintain stable interior temperatures

Relocation of the current reception desk and entryway wall so that, in Feldman’s words, “when you walk in you will really see the museum open before you.”

Installation of a new heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system

Removal of the shallow pond on the lower level of the building

New railing around the main staircase

Installation of new ceilings, floors and LED lighting systems

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