Off Center

Nate Solas blogged Wednesday about the Walker’s participation in ArtShare, a Facebook application allowing you (assuming you’re among the 230 gazillion registered users of Facebook) to show/share selected artwork from museums’ collections on your profile page. The Walker has its own Facebook profile, as do a couple dozen other contemporary art centers and museums around the U.S. and beyond.

A Facebook search for “contemporary art” pulled up some expected major players, a couple of independent magazines, corners devoted specific origin/ethnicity and a handful of thematic sentiments (there are about 350 members of I Enjoy Modern Art and That Doesn’t Make Me an Elitist A**hole).

Here are links to nearly three dozen Facebook profiles of a contemporary art bent:

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, of Washington, D.C. (175 members)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - contemporary extension (110 members)

Contemporary Art Museum of Houston teen arts council (70 members)

On the Boards, Seattle (160 members)

Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (200 members)

Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (60 members)

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (30 members)

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, United Kingdom (60 members)

Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado (20 fans)

Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Turkey (1,570 members)

Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (40 members)

International Contemporary Art and Design Lovers (780 members)

Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg (710 members)

Axis — Online Resource for Contemporary Art (800 members)

Chinese Contemporary Art (450 members)

Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia (410 members)

Contemporary Egyptian Artists (375 members)

International Academy of Art Palestine (350 members)

Connoisseurs of Contemporary African Art (275 members)

BM Suma Contemporary Art Center, of Istanbul, Turkey (280 members)

Contemporary Art: Singapore (240 members)

Art Summit Indonesia, a triennial international performing arts taking place in Jakarta (240 members)

Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (200 members)

I Made Something at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (15 members)

I Bet I can Find 10,000 People Who Love Contemporary Art (1,440 members)

I Enjoy Modern Art and That Doesn’t Make Me an Elitist A**hole (350 members)

Art Papers Magazine (2,100 members)

White Hot Magazine of Contemporary Art (1,350 members)

Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (160 members)

Contemporary Art in Liverpool (100 members)

Contemporary Jewish Museum (100 members)

Contemporary African Art (26 members)

British Contemporary Art (26 members)

Greek Contemporary Art (15 members)

Goteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art!, Sweden (15 members)

Contemporary Ghanaian Artists (8 members)

Filipino Contemporary Art, home listed in Switzerland (3 members)

Contemporary Art New Zealand (3 members)

Cuban Contemporary Art, formed by a gallery in Spain (2 members)

From today’s New York Times:

After nearly 20 years, Thomas Krens, the provocative director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, is stepping down, its board announced on Wednesday … The foundation emphasized that Mr. Krens would remain at the foundation as a senior adviser for international affairs, overseeing the creation of a 452,000-square-foot museum in Abu Dhabi to be designed by Frank Gehry.

A towering 6 foot 5, with an M.B.A. in management from Yale and a manner that is often taken for arrogance, Mr. Krens, 61, has long been synonymous with the Guggenheim. He is best known for his ambitions for developing an international network extending from Las Vegas to Bilbao, Spain, and for the types of high-profile exhibitions he presented, including shows like "The Art of the Motorcycle," a personal passion, and ones that tackled entire countries like China and Brazil. He has also organized trend-setting shows of contemporary artists, among them Matthew Barney, Richard Prince and, most recently, Cai Guo-Qiang. Mr. Krens has drawn criticism for some of his programming choices, including a show devoted to Armani suits underwritten by the fashion house itself.

The Walker has joined the growing number of institutions participating in ArtShare, the Brooklyn Museum’s art sharing application on Facebook. The team at Brooklyn launched ArtShare in November 2007, and the response was immediately positive. By adding this app Facebook users are able to rotate works of art on their profile, showing their favorites or just items that pique their interest. The app even works with Facebook Pages, and has been added to the Walker’s page here. (Like the Walker? Become a fan of our page!)

If you’re a Facebook user, give ArtShare a try and let us know what you think!

A big thanks to Shelley and Michael for making the application so open and also for working with other institutions to bring everyone online - they were responding to inquiries from us on day one and ready to help integrate our collection.

The Walker shop sells a product called Q-Ba-Maze, a Lego-like system of clear/colored plastic cubes that kids (or you) can fit together to sculpt … well, virtually anything. Drop a marble into any hole, stand back and watch the magic. I bring you this little commission-free plug because the Walker tapped architect-turned-Q-Ba-Maze founder Andrew Comfort to fill the shop display window facing Hennepin Avenue with something colorful, grand and plastic. With the help of University of Minnesota art and architecture students, Comfort spent most of Monday (and likely much of today) installing a giant replica of a red snapper. Eavesdrop dropped in on his process.

While digging through press archives a couple months ago, I discovered something extraordinary: a file for the Walker's 1997 presentation of The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing Disney's Theme Parks. If only I had lived in Minnesota then, I thought. What I wouldn't do to go back in time and walk through the Walker's galleries, set up to suggest the hub-and-spoke configuration of Disneyland. Of course, if I had lived in Minnesota at the age of 11, I would not be wishing to go back in time, because 1) I might have seen it and 2) I would not have spent many of my formative years taking car trips down to Disneyland. It's circular logic, I know.

I feel a kinship between myself and Karal Ann Marling, the curator of the exhibition. In the many interviews I read about this exhibition, she stands up for her area of expertise, "pop culture," with intelligence and wit, even with such pointed questions about Disney's possibly "untoward imaginative life rooted in childhood" and union labor disputes at the Disney studio in 1941. As for Disney conspiracy theorists? Insane. Television? "If I'm away from the television for more than five minutes I get nervous." "Nothing human," she declares, "Offends me." Her statements would have been a great reassurance to me as a pop culture-minded, aesthetically-driven first-year at a liberal, political college. "Pop culture" is not historically a thing to be respected or studied by the "educated." While everybody opened up their student mailboxes to The New Yorker or The Nation, I opened up mine to Entertainment Weekly. Marling observes: "There's so much bashing of materialism at the university, the phrase 'consumer culture' gets tossed around as though it's the next best thing to original sin."

So what happens when a member of that critical group decides to present these things for further observation? (click for more…)

People in Utah — along with environmental and public art proponents everywhere — are buzzing about the pending plans (and the lease approving them) of a Canadian oil company to drill in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, five miles north of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.

Recent editorials in The New York Times and Salt Lake Tribune have urged Utah legislators to “protect the Jetty,” and reading these, it’s easy to relax in the faith that rational, forward, progressive thought and action will win the day. Then you glimpse at how others are reacting to this story, and it seems entirely sane to fight for a Constitutional amendment allowing the United States to de-accession a state.

Here are a couple features/reviews from over the weekend to prime your mind and grease your wheels for artists on the Walker horizon:

New York Times review of the new CD from Drew Gress, who brings his 7 Black Butterflies combo March 28, co-headlining with the Prezens Quartet.

NPR’s Fresh Air featured Czech filmmaker Milos Forman, the focus of our Regis Dialogue and Retrospective in April. Forman is here April 12 for a public discussion about his career with LA WEEKLY film critic Scott Foundas.

This “Eavesdrop” installment takes you to Thursday’s press preview of the exhibition Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, led by co-curators Andrew Blauvelt of the Walker and Tracy Myers of the Heinz Architectural Center, in Pittsburgh. Installers were still painting, hanging work and gluing pieces together to get ready for tonight’s official opening. If you get the chance, also check out the previous Eavesdrop installment, where Blauvelt shows you the two- and three-dimensional models he used to put the exhibition together.