When art is hastily removed from the spaces where it should be seen and experienced, something happens. Abandoned, forgotten, ousted: watching art sneaking through the back door, and not in the sense of visiting an underground gallery toying with innovative presentation ways, creates a certain rush, trembling with instability, doubt, hilarity and eagerness.
* Backstage at the Modern, NY Times, photo: Penn Chan
- Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” (1889) at the conservation lab
* The new Moma is here, NY Times, photos: Jeenah Moon
- A painting conservator lifts the protective film from Jasper Johns’s “Flag" (1954)
- Henri Matisse’s “The Red Studio” (1911) and Henri Rousseau’s “The Dream” (1910)
- Cardboard copies of Brancusi sculptures stand in a former café space that has been reclaimed as a gallery
- Technicians experiment with the placement of a cardboard dummy of Constantin Brancusi’s “Endless Column” (1918)
I find myself captivated by objects in transit, but also by acts of carrying, hailing a cab, ploughing through, moving while burdened. It's as if the take-out coffee, the books under one's arm, the water bottles, the metal cans, the receipts and the schlepping bags encapsulate a rebellious power facing a digitised, seemingly clean world. I recently picked up a package I ordered online from one of those "mobile equipment" stores which were driven to transform into a little urban warehouse. The infinite flow of boxes, wraps and cartons, erupting from every corner, threatening to knock over the three men who were trying to grapple with it, was intoxicating. Here are our vices. The surplus will not be eliminated.
- Marie Kate Olsen with coffee and Olivier Sarkozy
- Chanel re-worked ad
- Katie Holmes hails a taxi in a cashmere bra, August 2019
- Bruce Willis & Kim Basinger make out near a Coke bottle in Blind Date, 1987
- Michael Kors campaign by Inez and Vinoodh, elevated by the thrown-in Evian bottle
- Sofia Coppola on the set of Marie Antoinette, sipping on a can of Sofia wine
- Gigi Hadid carrying a copy of Camus "The Stranger", March 2019
- Maurizio Cattelan, "A Perfect Day", 1999
- "Mobile equipment" store in Paris 11e arrondissement
An Amazon Prime brown bag might be, in some ways, the new Blumingdale's brown bag - right, you're buying groceries and not designer shoes, and yet you still declare yourself a person with access to unfathomable luxury - but at the same time, it's a completely different brown bag. It is demonic and beautiful and readily made. It is a curse and a saviour. It is freedom and it is imprisonment, and even though it's obviously something you can say about all "consumerism" bags as such, the Amazon Prime bag feels distinct, more potent than all the ones which came before it. This is why the most riveting fashion image of the decade might just be look 26 from Vacquera's Spring 2018 show:
The momentum here! It's all about the friction with the world. As a game of cover up is going on - the smoothly addictive Uber UI masking one of the most complicated knotty systems to ever exist - this obsession to streamline everything is pressured to find its earthy outlet. The distant echoes of a botched-up Victorian nightgown here are magnificently telling. History. Surplus. Reality. It's all coming back baby.