Hasta La Ideas

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #119 (1983)

The cultural triple threat that is the National Academy (the New York-based museum, art school, and honorary association of artists and architects founded in 1825) today announced its newest members, who will gain the fancy title of “Academician” and join a group that ranges from Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church to Robert Rauschenberg and Rafael Viñoly. This year marks the first time that artists working in video, photography, and installation were elgible for nomination—Academicians voted last year to revise the traditional categories of membership that included “Painting, Sculpture, Printmaking, and Architecture” to “Visual Arts and Architecture”—a change reflected in this mixed-media-loving group of newly elected visual artists: Siah Armajani, Richard Artschwager, David Diao, Robert Gober, Robert Irwin, Shirley Jaffe, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, Peter Saul, Joel Shapiro, Cindy Sherman, Richard Tuttle, Bill Viola, and Ursula von Rydingsvard. From the world of architecture, the Academy will welcome Stan Allen, Wendy Evans Joseph, M. Paul Friedberg, Jeanne Gang, Michael Graves, Steven Holl, Gregg Pasquarelli, Annabelle Selldorf, and Bernard Tschumi. “This new group includes great artists and architects who should long ago have been Academicians, plus a whole new generation,” said architect Tod Williams, a member since 2010, in a statement issued today by the organization. The 23 new members will be inducted this fall in a ceremony led by Robert Hobbs of Virginia Commonwealth University.

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Back in the 1980s, architect and developer John Portman’s firm was slammed by the mushrooming S&L crisis. “I said to hell with this, I’m getting out of here,” he explains in Ben Loeterman’s new documentary John Portman: A Life of Building. Best known for revolutionizing modern hotel architecture (and the Hyatt brand) with soaring atria, Portman decided to head east—way east—and lined up some projects in Shanghai, only to watch as China suddenly coped with its own dose of chaos in the form of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Luckily, Portman is patient (his Marriott Marquis in Times Square opened in 1985—after a dozen years, three mayors, and countless delays), and his Shanghai Centre was the first of an ongoing series of ambitious projects in Asia. Today, at age 87, he’s something of a celebrity in China, where his name is far better known than it is in the United States. Loeterman’s documentary, now rolling out to public television stations across the country, helps American audiences catch up.

The film offers a glimpse into Portman’s life and work that is made mesmerizing by dramatic time-lapse footage that captures daylight washing over the facades and spaces of Portman-designed buildings from Atlanta to Beijing. Viewers learn about his formative trip to Brasila in 1961 and undergraduate encounter with Frank Lloyd Wright (his advice to a young Portman: “Go seek Emerson”) and how he rattled the American Institute of Architects by acting as both architect and developer, an idea that came to him at the age of 29, when he had opened an office but was struggling to get work. “I came to the conclusion that if I got the land and I was able to design the concept and able to get the financing, there was no damn question about who was going to be the architect,” he explains to students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
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“Ladies and gentlemen, design is a popular subject today. No wonder, because in the face of increasing competition, design is often the only product differentiation that is truly discernible to the buyer.” That this sentiment came from Dieter Rams comes as no surprise. What’s striking is the date of his remarks, delivered to an audience at Jack Lenor Larsen‘s New York showroom in December 1976. He ended on a cautionary note: “I imagine our current situation will cause future generations to shudder at the thoughtlessness in the way in which we today fill our homes, our cities, and our landscape with a chaos of assorted junk,” said Rams. “What a fatalistic apathy we have towards the effect of such things. What atrocities we have to tolerate. Yet we are only half aware of them.” The full transcript of this disturbingly prescient speech is now available online thanks to Vitsœ, for whom Rams designed the eminently modular 606 Universal Shelving System in 1960. The big occasion is the legendary designer’s birthday: he was born 80 years ago today in Wiesbaden, Germany. Celebrate by treating yourself to Sophie Lovell‘s masterful monograph Dieter Rams: As Little Design As Possible (published last year by Phaidon) or a gorgeous poster of Rams’ famous “Ten Principles for Good Design,” available exclusively from Fab.com.

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(All photos courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

“I never thought people would want to wear clothes with monkeys and bananas on them,” said Miuccia Prada of her spring 2011 collection, a retail smash that featured madcap cotton separates printed with baroque scrolls, embroidered monkeys, and thick stripes. And the bananas? A wink at Carmen Miranda and Josephine Baker. More than 70 years earlier, when Miranda was still working the carnaval circuit in her native Brazil, Elsa Schiaparelli was feeling a circus theme. The designer described her summer 1938 collection as the “most riotous and swaggering” one she had ever created, and illustrator Christian Berard immortalized the “circus parade at Schiaparelli’s” in Vogue. “Clowns, elephants, horses, decorated the prints with the words ‘Attention a la Peinture,’” said Schiaparelli of her Barnum-infused couture. “Balloons for bags, spats for gloves, ice-cream cones for hats, and trained Vasling dogs and mischievous monkeys.” The two fanciful collections meet at long last in the “Naïf Chic” gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring Costume Institute exhibition, “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” which opens today.

Curators Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton reveal the striking similarities between Schiaparelli and Prada by focusing on seven areas of aesthetic kinship, from “Ugly Chic” and “Hard Chic” to “The Classical Body” and “The Surreal Body.” That last one is the showstopper, celebrated in a final gallery of mirrors (pictured directly above) that tricks the eye into perceiving an infinity of Dali collaborations, trompe l’oeil accents, furs, feathers, and pailletes, which Prada believes are irresistible to women. (“Paillettes are a typical form of eveningwear,” the designer has said. “Because I hate eveningwear, I try to make pailletes problematic—by making them so big or so heavy, for instance, that they become problematic.”) It can be a challenge to tell a Prada from a Schiaparelli, particularly when hefty fabrics and exotic textures are involved, but as Judith Thurman writes in an essay in the masterpiece of an exhibition catalogue designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, “Prada’s citations of Schiaparelli are an exercise in sampling, not imitation. They enrich and complicate, rather than merely translate her models, and they illustrate the way that critics and artists of every generation reinvent the formal language they inherit.” Prada is neither a copycat nor someone who is interested in translating the work of the contemporary artists she collects into covetable clothing. For her, art is an entirely separate barrel of monkeys.
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• Can you believe graduation season is upon us? Pratt Institute holds its commencement—the 123rd in its history—this afternoon at Radio City Music Hall. In addition to approximately 1,300 bachelor’s and master’s degrees, honorary degrees will be awarded to artist Ai Weiwei (he’ll accept his doctorate of fine arts via video feed), architect Santiago Calatrava, patron of the arts and education Kathryn C. Chenault, and Philippe de Montebello, director emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Fiske Kimball Professor at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Calatrava will deliver the commencement remarks.

• The Met Ball wasn’t the only black-tie event in town on Monday. Over at Avery Fisher Hall, the focus was on food, not fashion, as Alton Brown emceed the James Beard Foundation awards gala. In the restaurant design category, Bentel & Bentel triumphed for their overhaul of famed Le Bernardin, while graphic gourmand Richard Pandiscio took home the Outstanding Restaurant Graphics medal for his work for the Americano at Hotel Americano. Meanwhile, Jeff Scott‘s two-volume, 900-page Notes from a Kitchen: A Journey Inside Culinary Obsession (Tatroux) was named best photography book.

• And speaking of kitchens, artist and kitchen semiotician Martha Rosler is preparing for her first solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and it’s a doozy. Come mid-November, she’ll transform the museum’s atrium into a giant “meta-monumental” garage sale. That’s where you come in: the general public is invited to donate items—clothes, books, records, toys, costume jewelry, artworks, mementos—for Rosler to sell. Click here for the schedule and collection locations for donations. Why not seize the opportunity to get your artwork into a MoMA show?
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