Looking at Music 3.0 invites interaction. Visitors select songs to hear (and dance to), videos to watch, and zines to read. Three digital art projects go one step further, allowing user and machine to take an active role. Laurie Anderson, The Residents, and Perry Hoberman harnessed what in the 1990s were the latest digital tools to make truly interactive works.

Two recent acquisitions on view in the exhibition I Am Still Alive: Politics and Everyday Life in Contemporary Drawing, which just opened in the Drawings Galleries, prove that text-based art need not be disembodied. While On Kawara‘s series of telegrams sent to his Dutch gallerist—one of which lent the show its title—used neutral typewriting, modest scale, and the simplest of phrases to attest to a human presence, works by Fiona Banner and Paul Chan assert corporeality through scrawled handwriting, imposing size, and thick, evocative diction. This is art that describes the body at the same time that it re-creates it.

Like my uncles, my father, and many other fathers, Fluxus is a stroller, meaning all are peripatetic, funny, unreliable, enigmatic, and angry.

My father strolled, my uncles strolled, and so does Fluxus. The word “stroller” is not my own. I heard it at my uncle’s funeral. A strange woman said it. I did not know her. I suppose my uncle did. He knew a lot of people. When it came time for folks to say a few words about the deceased, the woman stood up and said, “He was a stroller.” Everyone laughed. At first I thought she was calling him a baby carriage but I knew what she meant.

Love Affair. 1939. USA. Directed by Leo McCarey

These notes accompany the screenings of Leo McCarey’s </i>Love Affair</a> on March 23, 24, and 25 in Theater 2.</p>

Leo McCarey (1898–1969) was a key figure in 1930s Hollywood. We have previously shown two of his Laurel and Hardy shorts; Duck Soup (1933), with the Marx Brothers; and his melancholy meditation on old age, Make Way for Tomorrow (1937). Although we did not include it, The Awful Truth, from the same year, is one of the best screwball comedies, and he made several other noteworthy films during his best decade.

In the Making is a free, ten-week program for NYC teens that offers studio art making as led by various artist-educators in the field. For the past 6 weeks, MoMA educator Mark Dzula has been leading the teens in his Music for the Eyes class through the strange and wonderful world of sound-art and sound-based installations.

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 Museum’s Painting and Sculpture and Architecture and Design galleries—please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—in one month (on Friday, April 15).

ANSWERS TO THE MARCH 4 CHALLENGE:

As a grizzled hip-hop vet, I can’t tell you how thrilling it is that curator Barbara London’s Looking at Music series has burned past the 1960s and ’70s to arrive, in its third iteration, in the 1980s and ’90s. Finally, it’s time for my peoples to shine!

Admiring a painting by Mark Rothko during a Meet Me at MoMA program. Photo by Jason Brownrigg

For The MoMA Alzheimer’s Project, my colleagues and I work to expand upon MoMA’s programs for individuals with dementia and their caregivers, which currently include gallery conversations and art-making programs at MoMA as well as off-site visits to assisted-living facilities.

With Turner Classic Movies (TCM) celebrating MoMA’s film-preservation work with a special 24-hour festival (all day today!) featuring 14 preserved films, I thought it made good sense to write about our efforts to preserve films, the background and importance of film preservation, and about the Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center, where this valuable works take place and where the Museum stores all of its films in climate-controlled conditions to prevent any further deterioration.

Port of Shadows. 1938. France. Directed by Marcel Carné

These notes accompany the screenings of Marcel Carné’s </i>Port of Shadows</a> on March 16, 17, and 18 in Theater 3.</p>

Last week, in writing about Walt Disney and Snow White</a>, I suggested a seeming disconnect between Disney’s entrepreneurial values and the sunlit, romantic fairyland of his films. This pointed up a possible imperfection in the auteur theory that suggests great filmmakers find a way to make a collaborative effort into a means of personal expression. A good cop-out here would be to say this resulted from Disney’s role as studio head and producer, but that is too easy. I hope to explore this further when we show Pinocchio in a few weeks. Meanwhile, Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows) raises other interesting questions.