… or pay nothing at all!

From Time Out, New York:

• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1071 Fifth Ave at 89th St (212-423-3587). 5:45–8pm

• International Center of Photography 1133 Sixth Ave at 43rd St (212-857-9700). 5–8pm

• Whitney Museum of American Art 945 Madison Ave at 75th St (212-570-3600). 5–9pm

• American Folk Art Museum 45 W 53rd St between Fifth and Sixth Aves (212-265-1040). 5:30–7:30pm. FREE

• Museum of Modern Art 11 W 53rd St between Fifth and Sixth Aves (212-708-9400). 4–8pm. FREE

Marguerite de Ponty

From The New York Times:

…these pieces have seemed to signal the end of installation art, like monochrome paintings sometimes seem to forewarn the end of painting. Add nothing, just use the space and the architecture, dummy. Boom.

The New Museum, seeking some heat of its own, has given Mr. Fischer the run of nearly all the exhibition space — three full floors — in its two-year-old building. It’s a smart move, even if those hoping for a sizable new aperture in one of the museum’s surfaces will be disappointed. The exhibition, titled “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty” (the subtitle referring to a character from the Symbolist poet Mallarmé), has been supervised by Massimiliano Gioni, a New Museum curator.

In the trifecta of sculpture surveys at major New York museums this fall — expect Roni Horn at the Whitney next week and Gabriel Orozco at the Museum of Modern Art in December — Mr. Fischer’s show started in the lead, with the most anticipation. It felt premature, presumptuous and unpredictable, even though Mr. Fischer, who was born in Switzerland in 1973, descends from a line of German-speaking bad boys that includes Sigmar Polke and Martin Kippenberger and that has been one of the strongest strains of postwar art. Anything could happen, the thinking went, given Mr. Fischer’s capricious, encompassing and, at best, fearless conception of sculpture…

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From the Guggenheim website:

From The New York Times:

The first challenge was deciding where to hang those 1487 panels — “The Departure of the Argonauts” by Pietro del Donzello and “The Argonauts in Colchis” by Bartolomeo di Giovanni, scenes depicting the myth of Jason’s quest for the golden fleece. “It’s like a domino effect,” said Colin B. Bailey, the Frick’s chief curator, describing how he and Denise Allen, a Frick curator, moved two paintings to make room for the panels and then rethought the collection’s installation.

(…)

And that problem led to the reinstallation of works in the East Gallery, which has just undergone a gentle face-lift for the first time since 1945. Using a swatch of the room’s original wall fabric retrieved from the Frick’s archive as a reference point, researchers found a mohair wall covering that was close to the original shade of coral…

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From Time Out New York, New York’s Best: Art bookstores you can browse for free:

• MoMA bookstore More than 2,000 books share space with art reproductions and design objects. 11 W 53rd St between Fifth and Sixth Aves, momastore.org

• The Guggenheim Museum Bookstore Stop by to browse recent exhibition catalogs and books on art, architecture and photography. 1071 Fifth Ave at 89th St, guggenheim.org

• The Whitney Museum Bookstore In addition to catalogs, monographs, and art history theory and criticism, the Whitney’s store offers children’s and whimsical books. 945 Madison Ave at 75th St, whitney.org/store

• The New Museum of Contemporary Art bookstore The New Museum’s curators’ input into buying policy means the selection here is as pioneering as the exhibitions themselves. 235 Bowery between Prince and Spring Sts, newmuseum.org/shop

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art bookstore Like the Met itself, you could easily lose a day in America’s largest museum bookstore. 1000 Fifth Ave at 82nd St, store.metmuseum.org

Click here for the full list

Has it been a few years since you took a stroll through the permanent galleries at your favorite museum? Have you taken advantage of the visitor resources and programs available? Why not plan an museum excursion for the weekend, a lunch break, or to unwind after a chaotic day at work??? One of my favorite (and luckily local) museums is….

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

The MoMA website makes it easy to plan your visit with everything from their hours and directions to advanced ticket purchases! They even provide a daily calendar to refer to if you find yourself with an empty block of time in your schedule.

In order to make the most of your visit, especially if your time is limited and you’re not sure what is on view, I suggest checking out the collections beforehand. If you are super organized, you may want to coordinate your list of must-see exhibits with the map of the galleries.

Most importantly, enjoy!

According to the O’Keeffe exhibition review by the New York Times, “There are two Georgia O’Keeffes. They’re closely related, but one is far more interesting than the other. Not so interesting, except maybe as a marketing phenomenon, is the post-1930s cow-skull painter and striker of frontier-priestess poses.”

While I haven’t seen the exhibition, I am pretty excited about it.  I always love to see great shows by monumental historic artists (like O’Keeffe), because I often get a much deeper appreciation that I previously had – one clouded with too many images from dorm room wall posters and coffee table books.  I’m also hoping for dear life that the exhibition is far far far better than the abysmal Lifetime movie I saw this weekend about the love affair between Stieglitz and O’Keeffe.

As described on the MOMA website: “the installation consists of the complete contents of her home, amassed over fifty years during which the Chinese concept of wu jin qi yong, or “waste not,” was a prerequisite for survival. The assembled materials, ranging from pots and basins to blankets, oil flasks, and legless dolls, form a miniature cityscape that viewers can navigate around and through.”

More pictures of the Waste Not installation and interviews with MOMA curators can be found on ChinaDigitalTimes.

When you visit make sure to walk around the installation and really think about all the carefully arranged items, categorized and grouped, and what it means to have collected and amassed them over the years. All of these items, ‘rat-packed’ in hope that they might be of use one day and come to your rescue. No regrets. Keep everything.

Then go to the top floors and look down; the view from above is equally magnificent!

Oskar Kokoschka, Rudolf Blümner, 1910, oil on canvas

Kokoschka’s portraits and drawings are the subject of an exhibition that opened at the Neue Galerie a few weeks ago. As the recession is finally catching up with exhibition schedules, you may see more museums putting on collection shows–it is a lot cheaper to make an exhibition from one’s permanent collection than spend thousands of dollars on loaned paintings. Focus: Oskar Kokoschka is a selection of the artist’s work from the Neue Galerie‘s permanent collection, which is still very much a treat–with such small gallery space, the Neue usually has a fragment of its illustrious collection on view at any one time, so an assemblage of Kokoschka’s haunting work should be pretty fabulous.

The exhibition is up until October 5.