tim burton and skin fruit

this past week i made it into nyc to see a few museum exhibitions. aside from the whitney biennial, which i'll get to later, i visited moma and the new museum.

it's been a little while since the tim burton retrospective went up at moma, and i'm glad i held off on seeing it. if the crowds last wednesday were any indication, it must have been an absolute madhouse when it was brand new. i'm not really the biggest tim burton fan to begin with, but i wasn't all that impressed with the show. for me it was just a bit too crowded. it seemed like they went out of their way to fill all the space available to them. all that did was to make the whole scene overwhelming. it would have made more of an impact to include less and let each piece have its own space.

moma also had marina abromovic performing "the artist is present." i'm also not a huge fan of performance art in general, but abromovic is pretty impressive. some of the things she puts herself though in the name of her art are very intense and to be admired. this piece is no exception.

before this trip i had never been to the new museum. my first impression is that i really like their bathrooms and elevators (lime green!). the show they have up now, skin fruit, is curated by jeff koons. and as someone who aspires to be a curator one day, my sensibilities were offended. i think koons should stick to making art and let other people organize it. the show wasn't cohesive and it wasn't interesting. mostly it seemed like koons picked a bunch of pieces that he really liked for whatever reason and tried to throw in as much nudity and overt sexuality as possible. which isn't necessarily a bad thing- except that in this case it was. and there were a few pieces that i really loved (specifically the janine antoni piece, kara walker, tim noble and sue webster's black narcissus,
and a few others), but altogether it really didn't work for me.

so my recent art adventure was kind of a bust. but i did get some pants that fit and i finally got to eat shake shack. and yes, it is all its cracked up to be!