Title wall of Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty at The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Vanessa Lam
Looking at the exhibition Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty, one can immediately sense how strikingly modern the artworks feel, even after 120 years. Organized by senior curator Jodi Hauptman and curatorial assistant Heidi Hirschl, the show features the artist’s experimental and radical works that have rarely been attached to the widely conceived notion of “Degas” (two words: pink tutus).
As part of an ongoing exhibition series with the Hyundai Card Design Library in Seoul, Korea, MoMA senior curator Paola Antonelli has organized three capsule exhibitions that highlight new frontiers in contemporary design and encourage international dialogue. The second exhibition, Data Visualization, opened in Seoul in July 2015 and has recently concluded. We live in an age where we are bombarded by data gathered by sensors, arrayed by software, and dispersed via ever-proliferating networks. To visualize this data is to understand it. As the projects in this exhibition demonstrated, designers and scientists create diagrams, three-dimensional maps, and other graphics to help us make sense of the copious amount of information with which we are confronted daily. The New York-Seoul exchange has deepened during in-person visits to Korea where Antonelli met with designers to discuss their current work. Here, one of these designers, Sey Min, reflects on the specific circumstances of data visualization design in the Korea.
Like most people I like to think that I’m open-minded, so I’m always a little surprised when I find myself caught short by my own conventional thinking. On a recent visit to COSMO, the 2015 winning Young Architects Program project by Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, I noticed my concept of architecture had somehow reset itself to the limited default notion of “a structure that would be inhabited by me” when I wasn’t looking.
Revital Cohen (Israeli, b. 1981), Tuur van Balen (Belgian, b. 1981). Still from Kingyo Kingdom. 2013. HD digital video, 19:23 min. Gift of the designers
Like any artifact of culture, design objects are often much more than the sum of their parts. Their forms and materials crystallize thought processes, tools, desires, and imagined futures, both near and far. Indeed, a group of design works that were added to MoMA’s collection in early June far transcend their materials—and in doing so, help us shape individual and collective perspectives on the changing world around us all.
Paul Klee. Bauhaus Ausstellung Weimar Juli–Sept, 1923, Karte 5. 1923. Lithograph, 3 15/16 x 5 7/8 ” (10 × 15 cm). Committee on Architecture and Design Funds. Photo: John Wronn
When friends went off on a summer vacation adventure and I heard myself request that they be sure to post some pictures on Instagram, I wondered what happened to “send postcards?” It really was not so very long ago when I could open my mailbox (my letter box) and regularly find a picture postcard from someone gone halfway around the world—or even just across town—with a handwritten personal note or a “having a wonderful time wish you were here,” or some artist post cards with wonderful, artfully collaged imagery from a mail art–artist friend. Now, it’s a rarity.
The Rainbow Flag waving in the wind at San Francisco’s Castro District. Photo: Benson Kua. Image used through Wikimedia Commons
We’re thrilled to announce that MoMA has acquired the iconic Rainbow Flag into its design collection, where it joins similarly universal symbols such as the @ symbol, the Creative Commons logo, and the recycling symbol. Artist Gilbert Baker created the Rainbow Flag in 1978 in San Francisco. Just a few days ago, he met Michelle Millar Fisher in MoMA’s offices to record an interview for the MoMA Archives, part of which is transcribed here.
In the fall of 2010, close to 4.8 million articles were downloaded from the password-protected, subscriber-only, nonprofit online academic journal repository JSTOR in an extended cyber hack that used the campus network at MIT. The articles represented roughly 80% of JSTOR’s total cache.
Golan Levin. Free Art and Technology Lab, R. Shawn Sims, Sy-Lab. Free Universal Construction Kit. 2012. Digital CAD files and 80 3-D-printed nylon units. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Committee on Architecture & Design and Shapeways
When the world we live in feels too impossible I find myself imagining the world I want to live in. It’s not just about the major acts of horrific inhumanity that humans bestow upon one another, it’s about the small daily indignities too. In the world I want to live in we’re not senselessly slaughtering each other, and no one throws trash on the ground or holds the entire communal table in the coffee shop hostage with their cell phone conversation, either. And people actually do step aside to let the passengers off the train. In the world I want to live in, it’s understood that we are all in this together. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I’m convinced that the smallest effort toward compatibility goes a long way.
Paola Antonelli, Director of Research and Development, and Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Robin Holland
What do Susan Kare’s graphic designs for user interface icons, The Living’s mycelium bricks, and Formafantasma’s speculative Botanica series of vessels have in common? Apart from each being compelling contemporary design experiments in their own right, they’re also part of the newest crop of acquisitions welcomed into The Museum of Modern Art’s collection, and all are now on public display in the recently opened exhibition This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good.
If you are interested in reproducing images from The Museum of Modern Art web site, please visit the Image Permissions page (www.moma.org/permissions). For additional information about using content from MoMA.org, please visit About this Site (www.moma.org/site).
© Copyright 2016 The Museum of Modern Art