in defense of #art

You were an inspiration and a hero to us all. Thank you for helping us find our creativity. Rest in Peace David.

Jean-Michel Basquiat‘s notebooks are on view in the Brooklyn Museum until August 13, 2015! Titled "Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks," the exhibition is focused on his sketchbooks from 1980-87 and many of these have never been displayed publicly before. The notebooks contain everything from poetry fragments, sketches, word play and more.

Architecture and Design duo Jouin Manku (Patrick Jouin & Sanjit Manku)  re-purposed a section of the Fontevraud Royal Abbey in the Loire Valley into a gorgeous hotel/restaurant. The designers sought to emphasize transparency and to encourage spatial dialogue between the lofty interior and the herbal garden outside. Additionally, most of the furniture was made to measure, to adapt to limits imposed by the architecture!

Gray Malin's photoseries brings kitschy accoutrement of summer pool parties to Antarctica. In turn, the cool arctic landscapes become conflated with summer waterparks-- a reality that’s perhaps not too far off considering how fast the glaciers are melting!! You can purchase the prints here with proceeds going to The Climate Reality Project. 

Surreal taxidermy by Karley Feaver. These were exhibited in Feaver’s solo exhibition, Becoming Otherwise (2013) at the Saatchi & Saatchi Gallery in Auckland. Taking the common tendency of birds to preen themselves while attracting a mate, Feave explore the absurdity of beauty and adornment. Feaver has stated, “ I am exploring how each one could exist in a domestic setting by adapting to their surroundings.  Through this, my investigations of the animals have developed by morphing animals and other various objects into newly formed creations.” 

Minimalist visualizations of band names by the Design collective Tata&Friends—my favorites are The Who and The Doors...How many can you guess? Check out more here:

The winter holiday season is long over but I adore Bohman+Sjöstrand and Petronio Associate‘s photoseries for the French department store Le Bon Marché for their Christmas issue!

4/20 is already over but you don’t have to wait another year to visit this gorgeous Hash Marihuana Cáñamo & Hemp Museum in Barcelona. Located inside the renovated Palau Mornau, the architect Jordi Romeu completely remodeled and restored the building originally dating back to the fifteenth century!

Today I’m coveting Foodie Dice / Mixology Dice! This Kickstarter-funded project is a brilliant and elegant way to experiment with your recipes...or shall I dare say (via artspeak), introduce Cagean chance-operation into your cooking? Check them out here!

The famous French art critic Denis Diderot wrote in 1767 that “it is necessary to ruin a palace to make it an object of interest.” For Diderot, the “poetics of the ruins” lay in the ability for ruins to stimulate the imagination. On the other hand, ruins are also profoundly melancholy as they are essentially tangible artifacts  resulting from the desolation of time. Invention and destruction collide in this triumphant photo series, “Dogma”  by the French photographer Aurélien Villette. The images seek to capture a “spirit of the place” and in these abandoned, once-hallowed interiors, a new sense of contemporary spirituality seems to emerge.

Some of the (funniest) highlights from Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte (1757-92), an influential catalogue of the findings from eighteenth-century excavations at Herculaneum! And yes, those bells are definitely in what you think they are. ;)

Stunning iced flowers by Tokyo based artist-florist, Azuma Makoto. By freezing them, each block serve as a time capsule, temporally preserving what is a normally a fleeting beauty.

One of my absolute favorite places in Paris: Deyrolle, a modern day Wunderkammer just behind Musée d'Orsay on the left bank. It was first established in 1831 by Jean-Baptiste Deyrolle from a passion for natural history and entomology and you can visit (and buy everything seen here!) this wonderful shop on 46 rue du Bac in Paris. Some of you may even recognize this place from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011) 

Olafur Eliasson's goes around the river bend in his installation in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. TItled, "Riverbed," the earthwork-inspired installation seeks to highlight visitor interaction and experience with the false identity of "nature." It highlights how "nature" itself is staged and mediated, both fixed and transient.

The photographer Jean de Pomereu captures the frigid beauty of Antartica in his series 'Sans Nom.' Pompereu has stated, “Traveling through this ice-scape felt like entering a lost city, resembling Atlantis, where the icebergs replaced monumental ruins."

Cerise Doucède's photoseries “Égarements” captures the little moments of daydreams and hallucinations that we experience in our day-to-day lives. In each of these dioramas, each prop is painstaking hung from the ceiling one by one!

La Pagode, a cinema in the 7e arrondissement in Paris (57 bis, rue de Babylone, 75007). It was first constructed in 1895 in the then popular Japonisme style as a private cinema. After it became public in 1930, it was frequented by the giants of cinema including Ingmar Bergman, Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Cocteau. The theatre has now been designated a historic monument and is still in operation to this day!