street fashion

Young trendsetter from Planet Awesome.

o those violinists

 Iwao Furusawa hanging out at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

in the gallery

Outsider visionary folk artist Leon Kennedy discusses his work, Without A Vision, The People Perish.

angwusnasomtaqa

 

A protested French auction of ancient and sacred Hopi masks went ahead in Paris via a judge's ruling.  It generated 1.2 million dollars in sales, the 1880's artifact shown above (World News/Art Et Communication / Ho / EPA), Angwusnasomtaqa or Tumas Crow Mother selling for the highest price at $210,000.  

During the auction of Crow Mother, a woman stood up amidst the group of about 200 applauding auction goers, calling out, "Don't purchase that.  It is a sacred being."   

Protesters gathered with signs outside the auction, urging auction goers not to participate.  Bo Lomahquahu, an American exchange student and member of the Hopi tribe said, "We have lots of art that can be shared with other cultures, but not these.  Children aren't even supposed to see them."

The buyer, who declined to be identified,  defended his purchase, stating that, ".. if it had not been for collectors in the 19th century who contributed to the field of ethnology, there would very little knowledge of the Hopi," and, "One day I might give some back."  The buyer acquired 3 other masks, expressing delight at being able to add to his collection of Hopi artifacts.

The Hopi tribe of northeastern Arizona and supporters, including the U.S. ambassador to France and actor Robert Redford, urged the Paris auction house to suspend the sale due to the masks' cultural and religious significance.  Robert Redford wrote:  "To auction these would be in my opinion a sacrilege, a criminal gesture that contains grave moral repercussions."

The French court rejected the motion from both the tribe and Survival International, a London-based advocacy group representing the tribe's interests, the court asserting that it could only intervene to protect human remains or living beings.

Pierre Servan-Schreiber, the lawyer for Survival International, said, "This decision is very disappointing.  Not everything is necessarily up for sale or purchase, and we need to be careful."

pasta

Via Sauk River Review, a lovely lemon pepper pappardelle pasta with roasted shrimp and tomato.

the night watch

Via MuseumResearch&Study, a Dutch flashmob adventurously arrives at the mall on horseback in a dramatic reconstruction of Rembrandt's most famous (and controversial) painting, The Night Watch (De Nachtwacht), or The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq. 

Fascination around bringing the renowned work of art further "to life" is not new, including several films, music, possibly even the second movement of Gustav Mahler's 7th symphony.

Russian artist Alexander Taratynov created a bronze-cast representation of the painting - Nightwatch 3D - first exhibited in 2006, and now permanently installed in front of Louis Royer's 1852 cast iron statue of Rembrandt at the Rembrandtplein  in Amsterdam (shown in photo to the left, source: wikipedia, uploader: Hippolyte). Which the actors' rendition may show a more immediately apparent resemblance to.

According to wiki and Rembrandt The Nighwatch blogspot, The Night Watch is notable for its sense of motion - versus the more static military postures employed - along with the painting's large size and rendition of light and color.   The painting has had a long and colorful history of its own, including several alterations (also removing two characters), storage in a Dutch castle throughout World War II, theft, conspiracy theory, and two major acts of vandalism - one by a man throwing an acid, and another by an unemployed schoolteacher with a bread knife who later committed suicide.

 

As for that surprising and enjoyable shoppers' *treat*, those actors (in seventeenth century outfits - and also swinging in from the ceiling) were promoting the re-opening of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and following an extensive restoration program since 2003.  The Night Watch is housed there - the Dutch national museum, that is, which is located in Museum Square, Amsterdam South, close to the Van Gogh Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Concertgebouw.

*Photo credit, bottom/Wikipedia/public domain without source information/Recreation of Rembrandt's The Night Watch, the lines showing how the present painting was cut down from the artist's original.   You can see the two excluded characters to the viewer's left.

merry frolics

Enjoy a 1906 feature - The 400 Tricks of the Devil - from French illusionist and filmmaker Georges Méliès (who also stars in).



According to wiki, this enchanting short has also been known as The Merry Frolics of Satan, Les quatre cents farces du diable, Les 400 farces du diable, and Les quatre cents coups du diable.

street fashion

This photo in Austin at the SXSW.

swingin' bach

Iwao Furusawa and Taro Hakase swingin' with Bach's Concerto for Two Violins.

in the shop

NY photographer Dustin Cohen takes us into the shop of  91 year old veteran Frank Catafulmo with this charming film short, The Shoemaker.  Mr. Catafulmo has been repairing shoes in Brooklyn almost 70 years, since the end of World  War II.  Via Huffpost with photostream here.

great and mighty things

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is running an outsider art exhibit, Great and Mighty Things, through June 9th.  It includes 200 pieces collected over the last 30 years by long-time Philadelphians Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz.  The show's title comes from one of several selections by the late artist Reverend Howard Finster who combined religious text and imagery (in this case, from Jeremiah 33:3, "Come with me and I will show you great and mighty things").  More here in a review by Sarah Burford with Title Magazine.  Below, a tour by Curator Ann Percy and Curatorial Assistant Cara Zimmerman.

hot cocoa

How to really make one (whatever time of year).

whale of a tale?

You may have read that risqué tale about Tattoos and Scrimshaw: The Art of the Sailor, the B.C. Vancouver Maritime Museum exhibit including two dozen erotic carvings on sperm whale teeth presumably dating back to the 19th century.  The family-friendly locale gained notoriety when a local mom took her two sons, ages two and three, to inadvertently see things like this (photostream at link with sexually graphic content).  Such a twitter went up that Stephen Colbert hilariously featured the issue on his show.  The National Post now reports that the artifacts are fake - and not because they are not naughty - but because the pornography is not from the 19th century.  James Delgado, director of maritime heritage for the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and a former executive director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum - previously called in expert Stewart Frank, a Massachusetts-based curator and authority in the realm of fake scrimshaw.  Apparently, the market "abounds with specimens attempting to masquerade as the work of a Moby Dick-era whaler."  Said Mr. Frank, "It's all a fake."  At which Mr. Delgado, during his tenure, squirreled the material away in museum storage with a report on their findings.

From the Post:

The style was indeed too modern to have come from the 1800s, but the real “smoking gun” could be seen in the cracks of the antique ivory itself. The engravings, which had likely been done with a machine, were conducted over top of the existing cracks — indicating a recent engraving, even if the whale teeth themselves were authentic.

Mr. Frank even had a possible culprit; an unknown carver in the Los Angeles area that had been selling fake erotic scrimshaw since at least the 1970s. “He said it was likely the work of one person who unscrupulously took in this collector who wouldn’t know otherwise,” said Mr. Delgado.

As for the otherwise controversial issues surrounding the show, the show goes on, with an additional disclaimer to the one accompanying the museum's family-friendly photo ad, but one that was there all along;  i.e.:

This whole arrangement was known to the museum’s current managers, of course, which is why they posted a sign warning that some of the pieces have had their “authenticity questioned,” but that “it was felt that the images depicted were true to the period.”

 “We can’t say for sure if these examples are from the period, but even if they were produced in the 1920s, does that make them fake because they weren’t produced in the 19th century by whalers?” said current museum director Simon Robinson.

*Photo credits/top, Vancouver Sun/photographer: Arlen Redekop/Tattoos & Scrimshaw: The Art of the Sailor exhibit at Vancouver Maritime Museum/bottom, Vancouver Sun/photographer: Arlen Redekop/"A whalebone carving showing a captain preoccupied with land-based pursuits from Tattoos & Scrimshaw: The Art of the Sailor exhibit on now at the Vancouver Maritime Museum."