As you’ve probably noticed, it has been a few weeks since the last An Auteurist History of Film post. The column’s author, curator Charles Silver, is currently taking a brief hiatus, but his weekly musings on film history and auteur theory will resume shortly.

Five for Friday, written by a variety of MoMA staff members, is our attempt to spotlight some of the compelling, charming, and downright curious works in the Museum’s rich collection.

Like every good New Englander, I eagerly await the start of the fall season and the bounty it brings.

One learns, I think, a fair amount about a national culture through its cinema, particularly if the culture is as homogenous as is Korea’s, with its rituals, social practices, communal aspirations, tortured history, and earthy cuisine. What is quite special to me is, unlike many other cinemas, that Korean films are made first and foremost for Koreans, because, after all, it is they and not anybody else who speak the language in which the films are made, and, unlike films manufactured by and for the Hollywood studios, they are not made with the export market foremost in mind.

In its August 1997 issue, Longboarder magazine ran a story on MoMA’s Hobie surfboard with the tag line “MoMA’s Got a Woody: Yes, But is it Art?” Fun hook, but perhaps the wrong question. The better question might be, why a surfboard? or better still, why this surfboard?

Trying to figure out which of Roman Polanski’s films are or are not “horror films” is a maddening and, in the end, fruitless exercise.

How well do you know your MoMA? If you think you can identify the artist and title of each of these works—all currently on view in the Painting and Sculpture galleries—please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers next month (on Friday, October 7).

The multidisciplinary teams working on projects for the exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream have two weeks to go in the workshop phase before the final public Open Studios at MoMA PS1 on Saturday, September 17.

To commemorate the passing of one of the 20th century’s most extraordinary artists, MoMA recently installed eight works by Lucian Freud on the second floor. The two paintings, three drawings, and three etchings were selected from the 21 objects by Freud in the Museum’s collection.

Five for Friday, written by a variety of MoMA staff members, is our attempt to spotlight some of the compelling, charming, and downright curious works in the Museum’s rich collection.

The multidisciplinary teams working on projects for the exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream have three weeks to go in the workshop phase before the final public Open Studios at MoMA PS1, on Saturday, September 17.