A Master Opens the Door to an Empire:
‘Dürer and Beyond’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
"The title of a new exhibition, “Dürer and Beyond: Central European Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1400-1700,” presents a bit of a conundrum. How do we get beyond Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), the ne plus ultra draftsman and all-around Northern Renaissance master, an artist so secure in his greatness that he painted himself as Jesus?
"We don’t, at least not often in this show, which surveys the Met’s holdings of drawings made before 1700 by artists working in the Holy Roman Empire (an area that today encompasses Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic and parts of other countries). But the offerings should nevertheless entice viewers to look more closely at the art of Central Europe, which absorbed diverse religious and stylistic influences from Italian, Dutch and Flemish art.
"“Dürer and Beyond” was organized by Stijn Alsteens and Freyda Spira, curators in the Met’s drawings and prints department. It includes about 100 drawings, supplemented by prints, illustrated books and decorative objects."
"In the expanding field of postwar American painting, more room should be made for the seductive yet rigorous art of Robert De Niro Sr. (1922-1993). De Niro, whose son is the movie star, studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College and with Hans Hofmann in New York and Providence, R.I. He made his solo debut at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in 1946 and showed regularly in the 1950s at the Charles Egan Gallery, alongside de Kooning, Rothko and Kline.
By 1960, the starting point of this exhibition, he had made abstraction the setting for a loosely figurative art, painting the thick outlines of nudes, still lifes and rooftops among briskly improvised expanses of bright color."
Also see: Robert De Niro S: A Complete Artist
Yugi Agematsu
"The found-object aesthetic is pushed to beautiful, ephemeral and mind-blowing extremes by Yuji Agematsu, who was born in Japan in 1956, moved to New York in 1980 and is having his first solo show in a commercial gallery in 20 years.
"Mr. Agematsu left actual objects — found or otherwise —behind about 25 years ago. That’s when he began selecting small pieces of trash from the streets and gutters of New York, pinning them unaltered to walls and also archiving them in carefully labeled cardboard files. Several hundred of his selections are on view here, mostly presented one at a time, but sometimes arranged in whorl-like clusters....
"This work is a wonderful lesson in focus and attention. Fluxus, Situationism, John Cage and Jean Dubuffet are among its precedents. It explodes the notion, basic to assemblage, that the materials to make art are everywhere. It argues instead that we are surrounded by intact artworks, formed by the incessant collaborations of nature and modern life, awaiting extraction."
"There is speculation within the technology industry that the supremacy of the PC is over and that Microsoft’s influence is waning along with it. Executives at Apple have boasted that the explosive growth in sales of the iPad and the iPhone are evidence of the arrival of a post-PC era."
Non-Profit Pathology
"Some people say — though never publicly — that the elephant in the room of the nonprofit sector is that people work in the sector because they can't cut it in business. That's not what this post is about.
"Allow me to introduce a brand new elephant to the room: Maybe people get into the compassion business full-time not because they're more compassionate than others but because they're codependent. Maybe the driving force is really inverted narcissism — an unhealthy and unexamined addiction to care-taking or to self-neglect....
"We have to ask ourselves, why would we choose to go into an industry where our compensation is not tied to our value? Where we are constantly told that there are not enough resources with which to fulfill our potential to make a difference? Why would we do that if I really do want to change things? And why would we choose to work on problems that are so intractable? What in our personalities draws us to frustratingly difficult — perhaps unsolvable — problems?"
"The recent brouhaha set off by Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen (who infamously noted that Ann Romney "never worked a day in her life") is telling on an infinite number of levels. All women on both sides of the so-called "Mommy Wars" (and those horribly caught in the middle of the conflict zone) feel a prickly defensiveness, regardless of where they sit on the spectrum.
"But here is another reason why Rosen's remark touched a third rail, and it has to do with — let's just put it out there — men's identity crisis....
"Yes, there is a war on, but it's not just a war on, over, or between women. It's an economic and identity war. When people lack self-esteem and feel threatened, disrespected and disenfranchised, they snipe at each other. We become defensive of our world-views — even reactionary. And in the echo-chamber of the current media, which feasts upon our discomfort, we all become stridently unthinking, defensive and blaming."
