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      Jazzed About Abstraction: Jack Whitten’s Show Is a Peak MoMA Moment

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      “I’m a product of American Apartheid,” the artist Jack Whitten wrote, a blunt fact that led him to project, in his art, a very different reality, one of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” It was a vision that propelled and buoyed him through a nearly six-decade career. “This is why I get up in the morning,” he wrote, “and go to work!”And how very lucky we are, at a moment when references to diversity and difference are being scrubbed from accounts of our national history, to have a refreshing tidal wave of a Whitten career retrospective sweeping and scintillating through the special exhibition galleries on the Museum of Modern Art’s sixth floor.Titled “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” the show encompasses some 180 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, from a 1963 art-school collage to a final painting from just before he died in 2018. Over that span Whitten called every studio he worked in a “laboratory,” and every piece of art he made an “experiment.” And, indeed, much of what’s in the show challenges ready definition.Whitten at his studio in 1974 with a large rake-like tool that he had made to apply a wide layer of paint to a horizontal canvas.Paul Viani, via The Museum of Modern Art, New YorkSuch is the case with a piece called “The Messenger (for Art Blakey)” installed just outside the first gallery. From a distance it could be a photograph of a star-drenched night sky, or of clouds of foam on a dark sea. Or it could a painting with white paint glopped and dripped, Abstract Expressionist-style, on a black ground. Get close and you find that, in fact, it’s a large rough-textured mosaic pieced together from thousands of pixel-like cubes of dried paint.You consult the title for meaning: Art Blakey, Black drummer extraordinaire, leader in the 1950s of the hardbop group called the Jazz Messengers. Suddenly the glops and drips look sonic, like musical bursts and pings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Frick Collection is Reopening. Here’s a Sneak Peek.

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      Holland Cotter is the co-chief art critic and a senior writer for the Culture section of The Times, where he has been on staff since 1998.Produced by Maridelis Morales Rosado and Josephine Sedgwick. Design and development by Leo Dominguez and Gabriel Gianordoli. Images: The Frick Collection (All Artworks); The Frick Collection/Frick Art Research Library Archives (Adelaide H. C. Frick); The Frick Collection Archives (Helen Clay Frick) More

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      Museum With Renowned Dinosaur Fossils Gets a $25 Million Gift

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      The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, home to the Tyrannosaurus rex holotype and a famous Diplodocus, will benefit from Carole and Daniel Kamin’s donation.Carole Kamin first walked through the doors of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in 1975 after taking a job as a buyer for the Pittsburgh museum’s gift shop. Awe-struck by the fossils on display, she would style herself as a “dinosaur queen” for the next 20 years.She sourced dino-patterned fabric from India for barbecue aprons. She worked with a toy manufacturer to produce models of the museum’s ancient creatures. She persuaded a candy supplier to make caramel-filled “Sweet Beasts.”Now Kamin and her husband, Daniel, are donating $25 million toward renovating the museum, which was founded in 1895 and has one of North America’s largest museum collections of fossils. The gift comes at a time when dinosaurs are as firmly entrenched in the zeitgeist as ever, thanks in part to record-setting fossil auctions and blockbuster films.The Carnegie museum’s holdings include the species-defining fossils — known as holotypes — of the terrifying predator Tyrannosaurus rex and the giant herbivore Apatosaurus louisae.It also displays arguably the most famous dinosaur skeleton on Earth: the remains of Diplodocus carnegii, a long-necked dinosaur found in 1899 during an expedition funded by the steel baron and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Replica casts of the dinosaur, known as “Dippy,” reside in museums around the world.The Diplodocus carnegii skeleton at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History is known as “Dippy.” Replica casts of the dinosaur reside in museums around the world.via Carnegie Museum of Natural History; Photo by Joshua Franzos, Treehouse MediaWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Birds of Paradise Glow on Their Mating Parade

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      Elaborate poses, tufts of feathers, flamboyant shuffles along an immaculate forest floor — male birds-of-paradise have many ways to woo a potential mate.But now, by examining prepared specimens at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, scientists have discovered what could be yet another tool in the kit of the tropical birds — a visual effect known as photoluminescence.Sometimes called biofluorescence in living things, this phenomenon occurs when an object absorbs high-energy wavelengths of light and re-emits them as lower energy wavelengths.Biofluorescence has already been found in various species of fishes, amphibians and even mammals, from bats to wombats.Interestingly, birds remain woefully understudied when it comes to the optical extras. Until now, no one had looked for the glowing property in birds-of-paradise, which are native to Australia, Indonesia and New Guinea and are famous for their elaborate mating displays.In a study published on Tuesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers examined prepared specimens housed at the American Museum of Natural History and found evidence of biofluorescence in 37 of 45 birds-of-paradise species.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Ubiquity of ‘Wicked’ Shows How Commercial Needs are Consuming Culture

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      Even before “Wicked” opened, the movie’s signature green and pink colors were turning up everywhere, from drinks topped with matcha foam at Starbucks to aisles lined with merch at Target. This cultural bludgeoning was, of course, orchestrated. Today, not even large marketing budgets can achieve such ubiquity without help.Attention has become fractured. Audiences, siloed in their social-media feeds and choose-your-own-adventure streaming sites, are ever harder to reach. Only by partnering up, like “Barbie” did by collaborating with 165 brands last year, can a promotional campaign become truly inescapable. “Wicked” went even bigger, teaming up with over 400 brands to ensure a saturation that would be, in the words of Universal Pictures’ chief marketing officer Michael Moses, “just short of obnoxious.”It’s just the latest example of how the culture industry has come to rely on collaborations. Brands pair up with other brands in endless permutations. Fashion companies and visual artists routinely partner, as in the case of Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami, whose landmark collaboration will soon relaunch. Around a third of Billboard’s Hot 100 songs involve a guest feature or collab (compared to under 10 percent a generation ago). At a time when culture feels stagnant, collaborations help artists and brands generate an air of originality without having to innovate.This frisson of newness has often been enough to capture media attention and entice consumers. But as commercial alliances have proliferated, their effect has diminished. Fatigue is setting in. “Wicked” participated in more than twice as many collaborations as “Barbie,” yet brought in only half its opening-weekend box-office take worldwide.Could it be that we’ve reached “peak collab?”Collaborations have become formulaic, fusing random elements from all corners of culture, until everything seems fungible: Baccarat and Hello Kitty, Louvre and “Joker: Folie à Deux,” N.H.L. and Lululemon, M&M’s and KateSpade. The ease with which such diverse offerings are lumped together only exacerbates the feeling of monotony and exhaustion. All culture is deployed in the same way, as if what distinguishes it — its history, form, industry or genre — couldn’t matter less. Collaborations appear increasingly desperate, more about profit than creative synergy or shared values. Louis Vuitton’s upcoming Murakami re-edition promises to be “a surefire sales smash,” as Highsnobiety put it, even if it’s also “a cash-conscious maneuver reflective of tumbling luxury revenues.”But the formula plays well to the algorithms that power social media and dictate what we see online. Designed to anticipate what we want, these algorithms favor content with a proven history — the safe and familiar over the experimental and untested. New content composed of pre-existing elements, like mash-ups of established artists and brands, hits the sweet spot. This preference has only amplified the incentives leading culture away from the lone visionary and toward joint authorship for decades. In hip-hop, guest features started as a means of creative exchange before proving their value as a commercial draw.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Torlonia Marbles Are Coming to Museums in Chicago, Texas and Montreal

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      For the first time, the ancient marbles are traveling out of Europe to the United States and Canada, for a prolonged stint.Stashed away in a cavernous Roman deposit, hidden from the world for the better part of the last century, the Torlonia Collection — the largest collection of classical sculpture still in private hands — now appears to be continuing its jet-set itinerary that started in 2020.After a glittering debut in Rome, and star turns in Milan and the Louvre Museum in Paris, 58 of the sculptures belonging to the Torlonia family, based in Rome, will be showcased at the Art Institute of Chicago in March, and will then travel to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.Dating from approximately the fifth century B.C. to the early fourth century, the works on view will include highlights of the Torlonia Collection, but also 24 sculptures that were specifically selected for the North American run by the co-curators Lisa Ayla Cakmak and Katharine A. Raff of the Art Institute of Chicago, after “multiple trips” to the Torlonia laboratory in Rome where the collection is being restored. (“A magical, once in a lifetime experience,” Cakmak said during a video interview.)Titled “Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture From the Torlonia Collection,” the exhibition will “feel very different from the European presentations,” Cakmak said. For the curators, it has been important to make it clear “that this is a completely new project,” not just in how it “was presented in our interpretation and storytelling but also the checklist” of works, she added.The Torlonia Nile, formerly Barberini-Albani. Sculptures from the collection had been visible, off and on, until World War II. Then they fell out of sight.Lorenzo De Masi; via Torlonia FoundationIt is “intended to be for non-specialists,” people who “might not know much about the ancient world,” but would be interested in seeing what Marcus Aurelius, known to modern audiences through the first “Gladiator” film, actually looked like, said Cakmak. She added that a scholars day limited to experts was “in the planning stages.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      World’s Priciest Dinosaur Fossil Comes to Museum of Natural History

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      The billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, who bought the stegosaurus fossil for $44.6 million, is loaning it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York for four years.The most expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction, a stegosaurus that the billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin bought over the summer for $44.6 million, has a new home: the American Museum of Natural History in New York.The museum announced on Thursday that it would be the first institution to exhibit the sought-after stegosaurus, as part of a four-year loan from Griffin.“It’s one of the dinosaurs that every kid knows how to draw,” Sean M. Decatur, the museum’s president, said in an interview this week before the dinosaur was revealed. “This is a unique opportunity to have something that simultaneously, I think, really resonates in the public imagination about dinosaurs, but also from a research standpoint, is really a pretty special specimen to understand.”The mounted stegosaurus was revealed from behind a billowing beige curtain on Thursday morning to reporters, photographers, museum employees and a group of elementary school children. It is scheduled to go on view to the public on Sunday after it is fully prepared for exhibition.The Sotheby’s sale of the unusually complete specimen — which is nicknamed Apex — shattered records in the booming fossil market. And it established a new king of the dinosaur world, at least in the eyes of the auction market: The stegosaurus dethroned the Tyrannosaurus rex, the previous record-holder.But the auction also stoked fears among academic paleontologists that museums and universities were being priced out of their research field by well-heeled private collectors. After purchasing the stegosaurus, Griffin, the founder and chief executive of the hedge fund Citadel, said he intended to lend the specimen to an American institution so it would be available to scientists and the public.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At This French Exhibition, Check Your Clothes at the Door

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      A museum in Marseille, France, has a show dedicated to the history of social nudity. On a few special nights, visitors strolled around naked, too.A group of visitors listened intently to their tour guide last Friday at one of Marseille’s biggest museums. One woman examined old posters with bright colors and bold graphics. Another studied a collection of black-and-white photographs laid out on a table.They all were naked, save for their shoes.The disrobed spectators had come to the Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean, known as Mucem, for an exhibition about social nudity, which practitioners often call naturism. According to the museum, almost 100,000 people have visited the show since it opened in July, and, at five special viewings, about 600 of them have been naked.Some were regular naturists, identifiable by their tan-line-less, often leathery backsides.But many had never been naked with strangers before, except for the odd skinny dip. For them, shared nudity was mostly confined to locker rooms or bedrooms, for sports or for sex. This was a new way to relate to art, and to their bodies. Acceptance. Or, maybe, neutrality.“Normally, bodies are so sexualized,” said Jule Baumann, 27, one of the visitors on Friday. “I liked the idea of being in a place where it’s just normal to be naked.”A naked museum show itself is not novel: Museums in Paris, Vienna, Montreal, Barcelona, Milan and the small English town of Dorchester have hosted such evenings before.The exhibition traces the development of the naturist lifestyle in Europe over a century.France Keyser for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More