NAN GOLDIN & P.A.I.N. STAGE PROTEST AGAINST BIG PHARMA IN THE MET'S SACKLER WING

Yesterday in The Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, people handed out pamphlets that were designed to look like official Met materials, with the acronym “P.A.I.N.”, Prescription Addiction Intervention Now printed on them. Photographer Nan Goldin started the group to put pressure on Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the makers of OxyContin, and some members of the Sackler Family, the company’s principal owners and big donors to The Met.

According to ArtNews at one point during the protest inside the Temple of Dendurwing,

“Many people along the pool suddenly began to throw pill bottles into the water—there were scores of the little plastic containers—as others whipped out black banners, one reading “FUND REHAB,” the other “SHAME ON SACKLER.” Goldin, brandishing white type-written pages, spoke in short phrases, and the crowd echoed her as a human microphone. She said at one point, 

‘In the name of the dead. Sackler family. Purdue Pharma. Hear our demands. Use your profits. Save our lives.‘

The group is calling for them to fund treatment programs and to take other steps to combat the opioid crisis. In the pamphlet, the group demands that “instead of continuing to wash their money in great institutions (like the Metropolitan Museum of Art) they donate their money to helping combat the opioid epidemic.” (Sackler family members have funded projects at Harvard, the Louvre, Tate Modern, and elsewhere, as the New Yorker and Esquire have reported in stories about Purdue’s development and marketing of OxyContin.)

The pamphlets contain statistics about the crisis, like 

‘130 people die a day from opioid overdoses,’ ‘at least 200,000 people have died since 1999 from overdoses involving opioid painkillers,’ ‘$35 billion—Purdue profits from OxyContin, the nation’s bestselling painkiller.‘ 

It also includes a list of demands, among them that the Sackler Family and Purdue should invest 46 percent of their profits toward ending the epidemic, and that they should 

‘advertise the dangers of their products as aggressively as they sell them to the public.‘”

In January Goldin published an essay and portfolio in Artforum where she talked about becoming addicted to opioids after being prescribed OxyContin following a surgery, and going clean only after two-and-a-half months in rehab. Goldin wrote, 

“The Sacklers made their fortune promoting addiction…the Sackler family and their private company, Purdue, built their empire with the lives of hundreds of thousands. The bodies are piling up. In 2015, in the U.S. alone, more than thirty-three thousand people died from opioid overdoses.”

The Met’s Sackler Wing came about when Arthur M. Sackler was approached by the museum in 1973 about funding the expansion project. Elizabeth A. Sackler, daughter of Arthur, who died in 1987, supports Goldin’s cause, saying that, by the time Oxycontin was introduced in ’95, Authur’s Raymond and Mortimer were the main owners of Purdue, and that none of the philanthropy done by Arthur’s portion of the family has used money from the sale of Oxycontin. (The Met declined to comment on this.)

After the die-in concluded, the group marched out accompanied by guards, chanting all the way: 

“Sacklers lie, people die.”

They made their way to the front steps where Goldin stood in front of a banner, held a pill bottle out in one hand, and continued her speech with the protesters gathered around her

“We are just getting started! Read the facts! Read the stats! We’ll be back!“

(Photos, Dung Ngo, Nora Burns; via ArtNews)

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM'S NEW LOGO & THE MET BREUER DISAPPOINT

These days everyone is a designer and critic too, for that matter. We are all entitled to our opinion but the reaction to The Metropolitan Museum‘s new logo has been CRAZY-negative. New York magazine’s headline for a story on the controversy was,

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New Logo Is a Typographic Bus Crash

Among the MANY other critics in and out of the design world, illustrator and designer Steve Cup summed it up on Twitter,

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new logo is basically the Human Centipede of branding.“

It’s hard to come up with worse than that. By way of explanation, The Met said in a statement;

“The new logo no longer relies on symbols and, instead, is based on the commonly used name ‘The Met, which has an immediacy that speaks to all audiences. It is an original drawing, a hybrid that combines and connects serif and sans serif, classical and modern letterforms. In this respect, it reflects the scope of the Museum’s collection and the connections that exist within it. There may be debate about the logo because it involves change, but the museum chose it because it represents something simple, bold, and indisputable: The Met is here for everyone.“

London’s Wolff Olins designed the new logo. In the 90s it helped a disparate constellation of British museums — Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool, and Tate St. Ives — develop a unifying identity, with the name in blurred letters as if spray-painted with a nearly empty can. This process was observed closely, by the head of its modern and contemporary art, Sheena Wagstaff, who spent more than a decade as chief curator at Tate Modern. But Wolff Olins’s strategy director Amy Lee told The Wall Street Journal that the company was not afraid of creating, 

“work that people feel strongly about” and that “the project is about far more than just a logo—it is about expanding the reach and relevance of the Met.”

So much else has been said but I’ll add my 2 cents. I’ve designed many logos myself and I once taught logo design at The New School, even though I was self-taught. I like this design personally. These days you need an insignia that goes across all media, online, in print and in person and this accomplishes all those goals and even if you disagree, EVERYONE is talking about it. Instant success in today’s world. If it had been your run-of-the-mill rebranding it would have gone virtually unnoticed.

The Met is in a physically expansive period, as well. Art critic Roberta Smith said in The New York Times,

“After a year and a half of anticipation, the revered Metropolitan Museum of Art has finally taken over the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue, promising to broaden and deepen its involvement with modern and contemporary art. Rebranded as the Met Breuer — with the subtlest sprucing up by architects Beyer Blinder Belle — this move is the first step of a plan that will include a $600 million new wing in the Met’s Fifth Avenue building as well.

For those who wondered if the Met would challenge the Museum of Modern Art or the downtown Whitney, the two opening shows at the Met Breuer feel more like a toe in the water of contemporary art than the expected plunge.“

Not a pan but not a resounding, “Yes!” either. She went on to say,

“The question of exactly what the Met is doing in the Breuer building is not yet clearly answered. The museum is on solid ground with its Mohamedi survey and also when bringing older art to life, sometimes with less old art, as in the early parts of “Unfinished.” But around contemporary art, its learning curve seems steeper than expected.”

The Met only has an eight year lease on the space as The Whitney accepted a large donation for their new downtown location with the stipulation that they NEVER sell the Breuer building. So, they may take it back at some point or continue to lease it to the best museum in the world. Either way, it’s a win-win for New Yorkers, especially artists like me.

DEATH BECOMES HER AT THE MET

You might not expect that a Metropolitan Museum of Art fashion exhibit would be named after the cult film Death Becomes Her. Strange as it seems, the passing of fashion legend Oscar de la Renta, fashion and All Hallows Eve have converged at The Met. This new exhibition explores the evolution of funeral attire from 1815 to 1915 with some 300 dresses worn during the mourning period that was once a part of life after death. The cultural implications will be illuminated through mostly women’s clothing and accessories, showing the progression of appropriate fabrics from mourning crape to corded silks, and the later introduction of color with shades of gray and mauve. The social implications of the day, from the distance of the early 21st century, seem bizarre. Curator Jessica Regan says;

“The veiled widow…(was) a woman of sexual experience without marital constraints, she was often imagined as a potential threat to the social order.”

Featured in the show is the dress worn by Queen Victoria to mourn Prince Albert I. She worn mourning clothes for the rest of her life, btw. THAT is love – and fashion – and tradition, all rolled into one royal.

Death Becomes Her; A Century of Mourning Attire opens today at The Metropolitan Museum‘s Anna Wintour Costume Gallery and runs through February 1, 2015

MATISSE & PICASSO IN NEW YORK

This fall we’re going to be seeing a LOT of Picasso on view in New York with a slew of shows dedicated to the master. At the Met we get the debut of Leonard Lauder’s Cubism collection at with his MAJOR gift of 33 pieces by Picasso (plus 17 by Braque, 14 by Léger, and 14 by Juan Gris, valued at over $1 billion)—that tells the story of the breakthrough that modernized the 20th century painting. Two of the city’s biggest galleries, Pace and Gagosian, are also going head-to-head with a pair of exhibits that look at different aspects of Picasso’s massive output. Pace probes the later works he made under the spell of his last wife in Picasso & Jacqueline: The Evolution of Style. The Gagosian show, Picasso and the Camera, the fifth curated by biographer and expert John Richardson, will survey his relationship with photography. It will be particularly useful as a companion to the Met exhibit, given Cubism’s rejection of the world seen through the camera’s lens in favor of the artist's internal truths.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 20–February 16
Gagosian, 21st Street gallery, October 28–January 3
Pace, 57th and 25th Street galleries, October 31–January 10

Pablo Picasso's 1913 “Femme(Eva)”(Woman in an Armchair) was donated to The Met by Lauder

There will be some 50 images by David Douglas Duncan of Pablo Picasso and Jacqueline in Pace's exhibit

Matisse installation at MoMA

Matisse at MoMA

I saw the Matisse show at the Tate in May where it was the most popular show in its history drawing in over half a million visitors. Now, virtually the same show (it's been expanded a bit) has now traveled to the states and is in NYC at MoMA. You know, the story goes, when ill health prevented Matisse from painting, he began to cut into painted paper with scissors to make drafts for a number of commissions. He wrote that it was “like being given a second life”. Soon, Matisse chose cut-outs over painting: he had invented a new medium. To see these snowflowers, dancers, circus scenes and a his famous abstracted snail (below), in this new exhibition. These 120 works, made between ’36 and ’54, have come from collections around the world to be seen together.

Nearly everyone has seen this work but, as the cliché goes, unless you see work in person, you haven’t seen it at ALL. Of course, they reproduce well, and the saturated color is SO pleasing and suited to offset printing, but truly, the scale and masterful technique is hidden from view in print. His “drawing with scissors” is like no one ever had.  Assistants painted sheets of paper in the MOST beautiful colors and after cutting by the master, they were pinning them to his studio walls. They have influenced countless artists. In fact, this is the reason I think it’s now so hard to get the full impact of the work – his cut-outs made have been so widely imitated in art school’s and by magazine and book illustrators for the past 70 years, that they have nearly sucked out all of the life and innovation out the work when reproduced. Almost. Until you see the real deal. Amazing that something so two dimensional has been rendered so full of the joy of life that Matisse transmitted.

"Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs opens today and runs through February 8, 2015

"White Alga on Orange and Red Background", 1947

"The Swimming Pool" installation from 1952, refurbished in 2008. MoMA owns this work.

MICHELLE OBAMA & CHARLES JAMES AT THE MET

So, you know Monday is The Met Ball. The First Lady, Michelle Obama will cut the ribbon on the newly renovated Anna Wintour Costume Center, although she won’t be attending the Ball Monday night. (This name of the center is somewhat of a scandal on its own as many thought it should named after Diana Vreeland, the woman who put the Costume Institute on the map – but it’s a done deal now. Sorry, DV but Anna raised $125 million bucks – and money talks.)

The latest exhibit, Charles James: Beyond Fashion, which opens next week, will explore the couturier’s sculptural, scientific, and mathematical approaches to construct revolutionary ball gowns and innovative tailoring that continues to influence designers today. After designing in his native London, and then Paris, James arrived in New York City in 1940. Though he had no formal training, he is now regarded as one of the greatest designers in America to have worked in the tradition of the Haute Couture. His fascination with complex cut and seaming led to the creation of key design elements that he updated throughout his career: wrap-over trousers, figure-eight skirts, body-hugging sheaths, ribbon capes and dresses, spiral-cut garments, poufs and all manner of complicated designs that end up looking the most simple and elegant. All of this finery will be on display. Today, this remains the REAL red carpet standard that everyone longs for. It’s sometimes called Hollywood Glamour but it is just pure GLAMOUR. The men attending The Met Ball on Monday night will be a bit challenged to keep up, as they are all required to wear white tie and tails. Look for pictures on social media #CharlesJames. Take a look at some it here.

Mrs. Charles James in a Swan Gown (Yes. He was married)

Butterfly Gown, photo by Cecil Beaton

Babe Paley, 1950, photo by John Rawlings

1946

Clover Leaf Ball Gown, 1946

Butterfly Ball Gown, 1955

Hipster Gown, 1946 (that's what it's called)

1948

The man himself at work