Divorce, Italian Style. 1961. Italy. Directed by Pietro Germi

These notes accompany screenings of Pietro Germi’s </em>Divorce, Italian Style</a> on October 16, 17, and 18.</p>

Italian cinema has historically been undervalued in relation to those of the United States, several other European countries, and post-World War II Japan.

From left to right: Conservators Michael Duffy, Anny Aviram, and Cindy Albertson, and Curator Anne Umland in MoMA’s paintings conservation lab with René Magritte’s The False Mirror; The Palace of Curtains, III; and The Portrait

In his polemical 1938 speech “La Ligne de vie (Lifeline),” René Magritte spoke of his “objective representation of objects,” claiming that, “In my view, this detached way of representing things is characteristic of a universal style in which the manias and minor preferences of the individual no longer play any part.”

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 and Contemporary galleries—please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers next month (on Friday, November 8).

On my way to MoMA each morning, I walk past the majestic Italian Renaissance revival building of the University Club of New York. This stronghold on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 54th Street was designed by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White and completed in 1899.

Pablo Helguera (left) and the author (right)

Teaching a workshop on art and game theory is the second cooperative venture Pablo Helguera and I have undertaken in the last couple of years. The first was a diet. Bear with me; the two are not unrelated. Frustrated with our personal efforts to shed a couple of pounds, we were ready for an experiment. A website offered a new set of motivations: We were required to report our weight to one another on a weekly basis, to allow our wives to monitor our progress, and (here is the kicker) we gave them our credit card information with the understanding that if we failed to lose the specified weight, we would automatically donate money to the National Rifle Association (NRA). How is this related? Game theory studies how and why people make decisions. Pablo and I wanted to lose weight but we also enjoyed eating —and the latter was prevailing, one dessert at a time. The structure of the diet added new elements to our decisions—our weight became public, our competitive natures were activated, and given our feelings about the NRA, our political and moral sense was now at stake in our menu decisions. No donations were made. The pounds melted away. It would have been a considerably different situation if the rules had been changed—for example if there were a slim and happy winner and a loser who ignominiously and publicly contributed to the NRA. Had we entered a diet with those rules we might have emerged even thinner, but as friends, we most likely would not have joined in the first place.

Game theory opens a set tools to think about rational and irrational decisions. These decisions are always conceived in terms of pairs and groups—otherwise they are not games—so we can begin to understand how we decide what to do in relation to other people. If we are interested in art that is relational, interactive, cooperative, or participatory perhaps we should look at this theory of relations. Pablo and I are not experts in game theory. But we both think games like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Dictator Game, the Ultimatum Game, and others are interesting starting points for a discussion of interpersonal behavior. When played in public—as we intend to do in the class—the games have an interesting performative quality that can lead to a rich conversation on a topic we are quite conversant in—participatory, cooperative art. Quite frankly, as much as we have written about social practice art, this is a new field, and we are all still struggling to get a handle on how to think about it.

I’m looking forward to the workshop as an experiment in this emerging discussion and hope you will join us on October 22 and 24 at MoMA for Games Artists Play: The Game as a Socially Engaged Art Form.

Whistle Down the Wind. 1961. Great Britain. Directed by Bryan Forbes

These notes accompany screenings of Bryan Forbes’s </em>Whistle Down the Wind</a> on October 9, 10, and 11 in Theater 3.</p>

The 1960s were an important period in the history of English cinema, but one that would be hard to label or define.

Installation view of the Arkheia exhibition Visita al Archivo Olivier Debroise: entre la ficción y el documento, 2011. Courtesy of Centro de Documentación Arkheia, MUAC, UNAM. Furniture design by Giacomo Castagnola

Working with the fascinating collections in the MoMA Archives on a daily basis has led me to think about the ways in which archives share their unpublished material with the public.

MoMA’s celebration of the landmark year 1913 continues with the 17th installment in our series of videos highlighting important works from 1913 in the Museum’s collection.

Dorothea Rockburne. Drawing Which Makes Itself: Neighbourhood. 1973. Duralar, pencil, colored pencil, and felt-tip pen on wall. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of J. Frederic Byers III, 1978. © 2013 Dorothea Rockburne/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I’ve been intrigued by Dorothea Rockburne’s wall drawing Neighbourhood (1973) since I began working at MoMA. It was acquired by the Museum in 1978, just five years after it was first made, but has been on view infrequently since then, and I really wanted to see it in person.

Workers dining outside the Museum on 54 Street before an exhibition opening. Photo: Amy Whitaker

I first started teaching business as a creative practice when I landed at the Slade School of Fine Art in London to study for an MFA in painting—MBA already in hand.