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Parrish Art Museum Puts Art on Wheels

The Parrish Art Museum recently unveiled a four-wheeled work of art-on-the-go. In a new partnership with the Hampton Jitney, the Long Island art institution is sending one work from its permanent collection en route from Manhattan to Montauk and back again, emblazoned on the exterior of a bus from the Jitney fleet. The partnership is one way in which the museum is seeking to re-brand its identity and reach out to the public in the months leading up to the spring 2012 opening of its new, spacious Herzog & de Meuron-designed home. The wraps are produced by SME, a branding firm that works with the Yankees and offered to swathe buses for the Parrish free of charge.

"Obviously we’re different than a sports team," Parrish director Terrie Sultan, a frequent Jitney-rider, told ARTINFO, "but they know how to graphically put something as complicated as an art collection on a bus that’s going to go by you in 15 seconds — unless you happen to be stuck in traffic.

Sultan says that museum officials settled on the design that was "the cleanest, the purest, and got the message out the best." For the inaugural bus wrap, hitting the road tomorrow, the design features William Merritt Chase's 1898 "The Bayberry Bush (Chase Homestead in Shinnecock Hills)," in which ladies pluck ripe fruits in a serene pastoral setting (quite the advertisement for a weekend getaway).

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Source (www.artinfo.com)
TED Annual Prize Goes to Parisian Artist

It’s not common for important philanthropic prizes to go to people whose work involves criminal trespass and who make statements like the following: “You never know who’s part of the police and who’s not.”

But the TED conference, the California lecture series named for its roots in technology, entertainment and design, said on Tuesday that it planned to give its annual $100,000 prize for 2011 — awarded in the past to figures like Bill Clinton, Bono and the biologist E. O. Wilson — to the Parisian street artist known as J R, a shadowy figure who has made a name for himself by plastering colossal photographs in downtrodden neighborhoods around the world. The images usually extol local residents, to whom he has become a Robin Hood-like hero.

For most recipients, the value of the six-year-old award has less to do with the money than with the opportunity it grants the winner to make a “wish”: to devote the funds to a humanitarian project that will almost inevitably draw donations and other help from the organization’s corporate partners and influential supporters. The chef Jamie Oliver, the 2010 prize winner, recently proposed setting up an international effort to further his campaign against obesity; Mr. Clinton’s wish has channeled significant resources toward the creation of a rural health system in Rwanda.

Reached by telephone on Wednesday morning on a bus in Shanghai, where he was headed to work on a largely unauthorized photo-pasting project to draw attention to the city’s demolition of historic neighborhoods, J R said that he had learned of the prize only two weeks ago and that he had not yet had time to think of a wish.
But he said that it would undoubtedly involve his kind of guerrilla art, which he has been creating with the help of volunteers in slums in Brazil, Cambodia and Kenya — where the outsize photographs, printed on waterproof vinyl, doubled as new roofs for ramshackle houses. “I’m kind of stunned,” he said of the prize. “I’ve never applied for an award in my life and didn’t know that somebody had nominated me for this.”\

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Source: www.nytimes.com
TEDx Talks Sweep the Nation

There, inside the Long Beach Performing Arts Center, a block from the Pacific Ocean, they gather for four days to share ideas and score gift bags at the TED Conference. Sold out a year in advance, the conference has scholars, scientists, musicians as speakers. They are boldface names: Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs, Jane Goodall. And as for any A-list party, an invitation is required.
The price to get in: $6,000.

Unable to meet the growing demand for access to TED, its organizers decided to democratize. They imagined a new conference that was TED but not TED, organized by local groups like schools, businesses, neighborhoods, even friends — at an unTED-like price: free.

And so last year the TED principals introduced a new concept called TEDx. They encouraged would-be organizers to apply for free licenses, and hoped for the best.

“It wasn’t clear at all that it would work,” said Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, which takes its name from the conference’s original areas of focus: technology, entertainment and design. He figured the inaugural year would bring 10 to 30 TEDx events, primarily in the United States.

To his surprise, there were 278 events last year in places as near as New Jersey and Florida, and as far as Estonia and China. There was TEDxKibera, held in one of Africa’s largest shantytowns in Nairobi, Kenya. And there was TEDxNASA, which had space-themed lectures.

Already this year there have been 531 TEDx events. Another nearly 750 are to take place this year and beyond.
“Students can’t afford to go to TED,” said Marina Kim, 27, who in 2009 organized TEDxAshokaU — part of Ashoka, a network of social entrepreneurs based in Arlington, Va. — and is planning a TEDx event for February. “The power of TEDx is that people can spread the same message but it’s user-generated,” she said.

Many TED and TEDx talks can be seen free on the Web, where they are the antipode of the viral videos of laughing cats and dancing babies that entertain millions of bored office workers each day. And yet the TED videos, too, have gone viral — viewed more than 319 million times since they went online in 2006.

There are TEDx talks about math curriculums, health care and mastering the work-life balance. Often, they capture the local flavor of the city in which they are held, like the TEDx event about breaking down walls held on and around the Great Wall of China. Rarely are they as polished as TED talks, though the best ones end up on TED.com. They can be gatherings of more than 1,000 people, or a few friends in a sparse room. But as is the case with TED, the most powerful events use multimedia, humor and audience interaction to make lectures about serious topics inspiring and easy to grasp.

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Source:http://www.nytimes.com
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum 15th Anniversary

The Rock Hall turns 15 this week. And there is much to celebrate. The not-for-profit institution is on solid financial ground, thanks to the establishment of a $5 million endowment. Attendance is up. And an overdue redesign of the museum interior is right around the corner, while the hall's long-awaited library and archives are taking shape.

"We've managed to do incredibly well over the past few years," said Terry Stewart, president and CEO of the Rock Hall.
"The museum is in better shape financially now than it has been in over a decade. We're very proud of that, and it allows us to take advantage of a lot of opportunities and understand where the museum can go in the future."

To mark its 15th anniversary, the museum will host a Rock Hall Ball on Friday evening, with live music by alternative-rock band Foxy Shazam, DJ Tommie Sunshine and soulful singer-songwriter Eli "Paperboy" Reed.

The party will be preceded by a VIP reception for U.S. Sen. George Voinovich. As mayor of Cleveland in the 1980s and governor of Ohio in the 1990s, Voinovich was instrumental in getting the Rock Hall built here.

As part of the festivities, the museum is naming a gallery in honor of the late Leo Mintz, owner of Cleveland's Record Rendezvous store. Along with Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed, Mintz was a key figure in popularizing rock 'n' roll here -- and beyond.

Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and others rocked the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium with an all-star concert when the Rock Hall opened Sept. 2, 1995.

Continue reading this article here.

(Source: http://www.cleveland.com)
Painting at Center of Caravaggio Mystery Unveiled

ROME (AP).-Art officials on Tuesday unveiled the painting at the center of the latest Caravaggio mystery, after the Vatican newspaper first suggested and then denied that the canvas was the work of the Italian master.

The "Martyrdom of St. Lawrence" will now be subjected to X-rays and other analyses to ascertain its attribution. But art officials and scholars attending the unveiling agreed the painting did not look like a Caravaggio — but rather like the work of one or more of his followers.

"It's a very interesting painting but I believe we can rule out — at least for now — that it's a Caravaggio," said art superintendent Rossella Vodret. "The quality of the painting doesn't hold up."

Vodret theatrically opened the curtain on the painting in a Jesuit church in Rome, revealing a canvas dominated by the figure of the St. Lawrence being grilled to death, his three executioners in the backdrop.

The 183-by-130.5 centimeter (72-by-51 inch) painting was recently cleaned up and features the dramatic chiaroscuro typical of Caravaggio and his school. The painting will not be on public display.

The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, set the art world aflutter last week with a front-page article headlined "A New Caravaggio."

The article made clear that no certain attribution had been made and that further tests were required. But the definitive-sounding headline and the fact that the claim was made on the day marking the 400th anniversary of the master's death had raised expectations. The Vatican has in the past announced such art-world news in L'Osservatore, sometimes coinciding with an anniversary.

But on Monday, the newspaper reversed itself and published an article by the Vatican's top art historian shooting down the claim. Under the front-page headline "A New Caravaggio? Not really," Vatican Museums chief Antonio Paolucci wrote that the work was not of Caravaggio's quality and termed it "modest" at best.

The painting belongs to the Jesuit order and had been kept for years in a private room in the Chiesa del Gesu in Rome, said the church's rector, the Rev. Daniele Libanori. As the painting's cleanup this year revealed an interesting work, art officials were called in.

But Libanori said the original claim in L'Osservatore came as a surprise to the Jesuits, too.

Mystery still surrounds the history of the canvas. Libanori was secretive about its origin, declining to say what city or Jesuit venue the painting had come from.

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Source: www.artdaily.com / Associated Press