Visit The Museum of Online Museums (MoOM): A Mega Collection of 220 Online Exhibitions

in Art, Design, History, Museums, Travel | May 27th, 2014

MOOM rijks

It is my habit, when trav­el looms, to case the Inter­net for obscure muse­ums my des­ti­na­tion might have to offer. Once loaded, I fix­ate. Chat me up about my itin­er­ary, and you will def­i­nite­ly come away with the impres­sion that these off­beat locales are the trip’s pri­ma­ry rai­son d’être.

It’s shock­ing how rarely I actu­al­ly make it to one of these off-the-beat­en path gems. Time flies and I rarely trav­el alone these days.

Take a recent fam­i­ly trip to Lon­don. Every time I brought up the Muse­um of Brands, my hus­band expressed reser­va­tions. “But what is it, exact­ly, oth­er than a bunch of old labels?” he’d press.

I hemmed and hawed, real­iz­ing on the cel­lu­lar lev­el that nei­ther he nor the kids could see the beau­ty in old labels. Dinosaurs, maybe. Ves­pas, no doubt. But old labels? This is how I found myself giv­ing the British Muse­um near­ly three times the Muse­um of Brand’s admis­sion charge to join a mighty throng of pen­sion­ers, squint­ing at a hand­ful of bor­ing but­ton frag­ments and a chunk of wood that no longer resem­bled a Viking Ship.

Next time, I swear…

01-1926-Hahn--Albert-alcohol-increases-risk-of-accidents

How for­tu­nate for me and my ilk that Chica­go design firm Coudal Part­ners is com­mit­ted to labor­ing far out­side its expect­ed scope. In addi­tion to cham­pi­oning Stan­ley Kubrick and poet­ry, they’ve tak­en it upon them­selves to con­sol­i­date a panoply of dig­i­tal col­lec­tions into the Muse­um of Online Muse­ums. (The pre­ferred acronym is MoOM, FYI.)

Unlike that of cer­tain of my trav­el­ing com­pan­ions, Coudal Part­ners’ def­i­n­i­tion of what con­sti­tutes a muse­um is demo­c­ra­t­ic. Gen­er­ous, even. The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, the Rijksmu­se­um, and the Musée d’Or­say share space with such non-brick-and-mor­tar com­pan­ions as the Busy Beaver But­ton Muse­um, the Gro­cery List Col­lec­tion, and Toast­er Cen­tral.

Raincoat

Like any major insti­tu­tion, MoOM touts their cur­rent exhi­bi­tions, a sea­son­al sam­pling of five. This spring brings togeth­er the Rijksmu­se­um’s Stu­dio Project, NASA’s Space Food Hall of Fame, a col­lec­tion of Dutch safe­ty posters from 50 Watts, 40 retro-groovy Japan­ese ads com­pli­ments of Voic­es of East Anglia, and a pho­to­graph­ic sur­vey of eggnog car­tons. (That last one real­ly deserves a brick and mor­tar home. Loca­tion is imma­te­r­i­al. I’d just like to fan­ta­size about vis­it­ing it some­day.)

egg nog

Mean­while, the talk of the town here in New York City is the reap­pear­ance of Mmu­se­umm, an eclec­tic, non-prof­it housed in a 60-square-foot Tribeca ele­va­tor shaft. MoOM, take note.

Find more online exhi­bi­tions at the Muse­um of Online Muse­ums.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

LA Coun­ty Muse­um Makes 20,000 Artis­tic Images Avail­able for Free Down­load

Down­load Over 250 Free Art Books From the Get­ty Muse­um

Ayun Hal­l­i­day wrote about her expe­ri­ences as a muse­um guard in her 3rd book, Job Hop­per. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Download Over 300+ Free Art Books From the Getty Museum

in Art, e-books, Museums | January 22nd, 2014

cézanne

Yes­ter­day, we wrote about the Well­come Library’s open­ing up of its dig­i­tal archives and mak­ing over 100,000 med­ical images freely avail­able online. If you’ve already made your way through this choice selec­tion (or if the prospect of view­ing a 19th cen­tu­ry leg ampu­ta­tion doesn’t quite pique your curios­i­ty) have no fear. Get­ty Pub­li­ca­tions just announced the launch of its Vir­tu­al Library, where read­ers can freely browse and down­load over 250 art books from the publisher’s back­list cat­a­logue.

The Vir­tu­al Library con­sists of texts asso­ci­at­ed with sev­er­al Get­ty insti­tu­tions. Read­ers can view exten­sive­ly researched exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logues from the J. Paul Get­ty Muse­um, includ­ing Paul Cézan­ne’s late-life water­colours, when the painter raised the still life to a high art (Cézanne in the Stu­dio: Still Life in Water­col­ors, 2004), as well as the woe­ful­ly under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed Flem­ish illus­tra­tions of the 15th and 16th cen­turies (Illu­mi­nat­ing the Renais­sance: The Tri­umph of Flem­ish Man­u­script, 2003).  The col­lec­tion also con­tains detailed trea­tis­es on art con­ser­va­tion from the Get­ty Con­ser­va­tion Insti­tute, and schol­ar­ly works from the Get­ty Research Insti­tute, both of which include a mul­ti­tude of books on spe­cial­ized top­ics. Fan­cy read­ing about the rela­tion­ship between Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, the two leg­endary 17th cen­tu­ry painters who lived in the Nether­lands’ city of Antwerp? There’s a book on that. Intrigued by all the pros­ti­tutes in French impres­sion­ism? Try Paint­ed Love: Pros­ti­tu­tion in French Art of the Impres­sion­ist Era (2003). Per­haps you’re par­tial to ancient vas­es, and have already read The Col­ors of Clay (2006), Pots & Plays (2007), and Greek Vas­es (1983)? Don’t wor­ry, the Getty’s vir­tu­al library has at least 8 more vase-ori­ent­ed books.

All of the Getty’s vir­tu­al library vol­umes are avail­able in PDF for­mat, and can be added to your Google Books library. If you’re look­ing for more free art books, don’t miss our post from last year: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art and the Guggen­heim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

The Get­ty Puts 4600 Art Images Into the Pub­lic Domain (and There’s More to Come)

The Nation­al Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Art­work Freely Avail­able Online

Read 700 Free eBooks Made Avail­able by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press

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Google Puts Over 57,000 Works of Art on the Web

in Art, Google, Museums | December 31st, 2013

dali google art project

In its art preser­va­tion­ist wing, the Cul­tur­al Insti­tute, Google hous­es an enor­mous dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of art­work span­ning cen­turies and con­ti­nents in what it calls the Art Project. Google’s col­lec­tion, writes Drue Katao­ka at Wired, is part of a “big deal […] it sig­nals a broad­er, emerg­ing ‘open con­tent’ art move­ment.” “Besides the Get­ty,” Katao­ka notes, this move­ment to dig­i­tize fine art col­lec­tions includes efforts by “Los Ange­les’ LACMA… as well as D.C.’s Nation­al Gallery of Art, the Dal­las Muse­um of Art, Baltimore’s Wal­ters Art Muse­um, and the Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Art Gallery. And Google. Yes, Google.” Google is work­ing hard to defuse this “yes, Google” reac­tion, post­ing fre­quent updates to its col­lec­tion, already a mag­nif­i­cent phe­nom­e­non: “Imag­ine see­ing an image of the Fall of the Rebel Angels by Pieter Breuegel the Elder,” writes Katao­ka, “or Vin­cent van Gogh’s Iris­es, in high res­o­lu­tion.” Now, you can, thanks to Google’s aston­ish­ing­ly vast dig­i­tal archive.

In the Art Project, you can stroll on over to Por­tu­gal’s Museu do Cara­mu­lo, for exam­ple, which Google describes as “an unusu­al muse­um in a small town” off the beat­en path. There, you can see this macabre 1947 Picas­so still life or this 1954 Sal­vador Dali por­trait of a Roman horse­man in Iberia (above). Then head over to the oth­er side of the world, where the Adachi Muse­um of Art in Japan con­tains 165,000 square meters of Japan­ese gar­den: “The Dry Land­scape Gar­den, The White Grav­el and Pine Gar­den, the Moss Gar­den, and The Pond Gar­den.” It also fea­tures gor­geous paint­ings like Yokoya­ma Taikan’s 1931 Autumn Leaves and Hishi­da Shun­so’s adorable 1906 Cat and Plum Blos­soms. Dozens of small­er col­lec­tions like these sit com­fort­ably along­side such exten­sive and well-known col­lec­tions as New York’s MoMA and Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art and Flo­rence’s Uffizi. See a tiny sam­pler of the Art Project in the video teas­er above.

BrazilTrompe

Google’s col­lec­tion has great­ly expand­ed since its com­par­a­tive­ly mod­est 2011 roll-out. The com­pa­ny signed part­ner­ship agree­ments with 151 insti­tu­tions in 2012 and the Art Project has grown since then to include over 57,000 dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tions of famous and not-so-famous works of art. Most recent­ly, it has added work to the online col­lec­tions of 34 dif­fer­ent part­ner insti­tu­tions. Google’s announce­ment on its offi­cial blog takes a themed approach, pre­sent­ing ver­sions of sev­er­al trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) works that have just joined the Art Project. Trompe l’oeil is a gim­mick as old as antiq­ui­ty, and Google gives us sev­er­al exam­ples, begin­ning with the styl­ish, under­stat­ed Brazil­ian train sta­tion mur­al right above by Adri­ana Vare­jao. Below, see the ceil­ing of Italy’s Nation­al Archae­o­log­i­cal Muse­um of Fer­rara, a much more clas­si­cal (or Baroque) approach to trompe l’oeil that dis­plays some typ­i­cal ele­ments of the peri­od, includ­ing elab­o­rate geo­met­ric designs, lots of gold, and well-dressed fig­ures star­ing down at view­ers or float­ing off into the heav­ens. See more trompe l’oeil works on Google’s blog, and access their full dig­i­tal col­lec­tion here.

FerraraTrompe

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

The Rijksmu­se­um Puts 125,000 Dutch Mas­ter­pieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art

The Get­ty Puts 4600 Art Images Into the Pub­lic Domain (and There’s More to Come)

Free: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art and the Guggen­heim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Nazi’s Philistine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degenerate Art Exhibition” of 1937

in Art, History, Museums | November 7th, 2013

entartetekunst

Has any polit­i­cal par­ty in West­ern his­to­ry had as vexed a rela­tion­ship with art as the Ger­man Nation­al Social­ists? We’ve long known, of course, that their uses of and opin­ions on art con­sti­tut­ed the least of the Nazi par­ty’s prob­lems. Still, the artis­tic pro­cliv­i­ties of Hitler and com­pa­ny com­pel us, per­haps because they seem to promise a win­dow into the mind­set that result­ed in such ulti­mate inhu­man­i­ty. We can learn about the Nazis from the art they liked, but we can learn just as much (or more) from the art they dis­liked — or even that which they sup­pressed out­right.

vassily-kandinsky

Cur­rent events have brought these sub­jects back to mind; this week, accord­ing to The New York Times, “Ger­man author­i­ties described how they dis­cov­ered 1,400 or so works dur­ing a rou­tine tax inves­ti­ga­tion, includ­ing ones by Matisse, Cha­gall, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picas­so and a host of oth­er mas­ters,” most or all pre­vi­ous­ly unknown or pre­sumed lost amid all the flight from Nazi Ger­many. Hitler him­self, more a fan of racial­ly charged Utopi­an real­ism, would­n’t have approved of most of these new­ly redis­cov­ered paint­ings and draw­ings.

entartete-kunst-degenerate-art

In fact, he may well have thrown them into 1937’s Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion. Four years after it came to pow­er,” writes the BBC’s Lucy Burns, “the Nazi par­ty put on two art exhi­bi­tions in Munich. The Great Ger­man Art Exhi­bi­tion [the Große Deutsche Kun­stausstel­lung] was designed to show works that Hitler approved of — depict­ing stat­uesque blonde nudes along with ide­alised sol­diers and land­scapes. The sec­ond exhi­bi­tion, just down the road, showed the oth­er side of Ger­man art — mod­ern, abstract, non-rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al — or as the Nazis saw it, ‘degen­er­ate.’ ” This Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion (Die Ausstel­lung “Entartete Kun­st”), the much more pop­u­lar of the two, fea­tured Paul Klee, Oskar Kokosch­ka, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Max Beck­mann, Emil Nolde and George Grosz. There the Nazis quar­an­tined these con­fis­cat­ed abstract, expres­sion­is­tic, and often Jew­ish works of art, those that, accord­ing to the Führer, “insult Ger­man feel­ing, or destroy or con­fuse nat­ur­al form or sim­ply reveal an absence of ade­quate man­u­al and artis­tic skill” and “can­not be under­stood in them­selves but need some pre­ten­tious instruc­tion book to jus­ti­fy their exis­tence.” And if that sounds rigid, you should see how that Nazis dealt with jazz.

Note: For more on this sub­ject, you can watch the 1993 doc­u­men­tary Degen­er­ate Art.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

The Nazis’ 10 Con­trol-Freak Rules for Jazz Per­form­ers: A Strange List from World War II

Joseph Stal­in, a Life­long Edi­tor, Wield­ed a Big, Blue, Dan­ger­ous Pen­cil

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Getty Puts 4600 Art Images Into the Public Domain (and There’s More to Come)

in Art, Museums | August 14th, 2013

Getty1

Not long ago, I went over to the Get­ty to see the J. Paul Get­ty Trust’s Pres­i­dent and CEO James Cuno in live con­ver­sa­tion with Pico Iyer, one of his favorite writ­ers as well as one of mine. Cuno, him­self the author of books like Whose Cul­ture?: The Promise of Muse­ums and the Debate over Antiq­ui­ties and Muse­ums Mat­ter: In Praise of the Ency­clo­pe­dic Muse­um, impressed me not only with his choice of inter­locu­tors but with the open, for­ward-think­ing nature he revealed dur­ing the talk. On Mon­day, he demon­strat­ed it again by pub­lish­ing anoth­er piece of writ­ing, very brief but unde­ni­ably impor­tant: his announce­ment of the Get­ty’s Open Con­tent Pro­gram, which has just made avail­able over 4600 high-res­o­lu­tion images of the muse­um’s col­lec­tion freely avail­able in the pub­lic domain. You can down­load them, mod­i­fy them, dis­trib­ute them — do what you please with them.

Getty2

“Why open con­tent? Why now?” Cuno writes. “The Get­ty was found­ed on the con­vic­tion that under­stand­ing art makes the world a bet­ter place, and shar­ing our dig­i­tal resources is the nat­ur­al exten­sion of that belief. This move is also an edu­ca­tion­al imper­a­tive. Artists, stu­dents, teach­ers, writ­ers, and count­less oth­ers rely on art­work images to learn, tell sto­ries, exchange ideas, and feed their own cre­ativ­i­ty.” If you enjoy engag­ing in any of these pur­suits — which, as an Open Cul­ture habitué‎, I assume you do — begin by brows­ing all the Open Con­tent Pro­gram’s cur­rent­ly avail­able images, or check for down­load links on indi­vid­ual Get­ty col­lec­tion pages. This post includes three images straight from the Get­ty: Rem­brandt’s The Abduc­tion of Europa, Walk­er Evans’ A Bench in the Bronx on Sun­day, and a hel­met of Chal­cid­i­an type cir­ca 350–300 B.C. Cuno promis­es many more images to come, and mate­r­i­al from oth­er sources like the Get­ty’s inter­na­tion­al field projects. He’s got my antic­i­pa­tion.

Getty3

Relat­ed Con­tent:

40,000 Art­works from 250 Muse­ums, Now View­able for Free at the Redesigned Google Art Project

LA Coun­ty Muse­um Makes 20,000 Artis­tic Images Avail­able for Free Down­load

The Rijksmu­se­um Puts 125,000 Dutch Mas­ter­pieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art

Art.sy Rolls Out Huge Archive of Fine-Art Images and an Intel­li­gent Art Appre­ci­a­tion Guide

Free: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art and the Guggen­heim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Free: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online

in Art, Museums | August 5th, 2013

art of illumination

If you like read­ing about visu­al art but don’t like spend­ing the con­sid­er­able sums required to build your own library of vin­tage exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logues, feel free to bor­row from anoth­er col­lec­tor. Or rather, feel free to bor­row from two col­lec­tors, both based in New York, both of some repute: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art and the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um. Ear­ly last year, we announced that the Guggen­heim had made 65 art cat­a­logues [now increased to 99] avail­able for free online, offer­ing “an intel­lec­tu­al and visu­al intro­duc­tion to the work of Alexan­der Calder, Edvard Munch, Fran­cis Bacon, Gus­tav Klimt & Egon Schiele, and Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky” as well as ” oth­er texts (e.g., Mas­ter­pieces of Mod­ern Art and Abstract Expres­sion­ists Imag­ists) that tack­le meta move­ments and themes.” (That same post includes instruc­tions on how to use the Guggen­heim’s archive.)

klee-gugg

Late last year, we also announced the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art’s launch of Met­Pub­li­ca­tions, which will “even­tu­al­ly offer access to near­ly all books, Bul­letins, and Jour­nals” pub­lished by the Met since 1870. The col­lec­tion now fea­tures a whop­ping 375 free art books and cat­a­logues over­all. Tak­en togeth­er, these col­lec­tions exam­ine in detail art from all eras of human his­to­ry and all parts of the world. At the top of the post, you will see the cov­er for the Met’s The Art of Illu­mi­na­tion. (Who does­n’t love illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval man­u­scripts?) Below appears Six­ty Years of Liv­ing Archi­tec­ture: The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright, avail­able from the Guggen­heim. Giv­en the pres­ence of these and the oth­er fas­ci­nat­ing cat­a­logues we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly high­light­ed, word of these two muse­ums’ online libraries cer­tain­ly should­n’t stay buried in our archives.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

MoMA Puts Pol­lock, Rothko & de Koon­ing on Your iPad

Google “Art Project” Brings Great Paint­ings & Muse­ums to You

The His­to­ry of West­ern Archi­tec­ture: From Ancient Greece to Roco­co (A Free Online Course)

Down­load 375 Free eBooks

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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250,000 Artworks from 250 Museums, Now Viewable for Free at the Redesigned Google Art Project

in Art, Museums, Technology | June 12th, 2013

stripedshirt

Yes­ter­day we fea­tured the Nation­al Gallery of Art’s site NGA Images, where you can down­load 25,000 high-qual­i­ty dig­i­tal images of that muse­um’s works of art. Today, why not have a look at Google Art Project? Though we’ve post­ed about it before, you’ll want to check out its slick new redesign — not to men­tion its expand­ed col­lec­tion, which now includes more than 250,000 works of art from over 250 muse­ums. TechCrunch’s Fred­er­ic Lar­de­nois writes that the lat­est iter­a­tion of Google Art Pro­jec­t’s “improved search tools now make it sig­nif­i­cant­ly eas­i­er to fil­ter any list of art­works by artist, place, data and relat­ed events. [ … ] Some of the most impor­tant art­works are also avail­able as gigapix­el images. Many muse­ums also allow you to browse their gal­leries using Google Street View.”

The col­lec­tions new­ly added to Google Art Project come from insti­tu­tions as far- and wide-rang­ing as Kuwait­’s al Sabah Col­lec­tion, Japan’s Kawabara Memo­r­i­al DIC Muse­um of Art, Den­mark’s Statens Muse­um for Kun­st, and Aus­trali­a’s Art Gallery of New South Wales. At the top, we have an image of Sunkwan Kwon’s “A Man in Stripe Shirt Who is Drop­ping His Head for a Long Time After Phone Call,” made avail­able in the Kore­an Art Muse­um Asso­ci­a­tion col­lec­tion. But don’t look at the image in this post; look at the piece’s entry in Google Art Project, which lets you scroll and zoom as you please. And you will want to zoom, since Kwon’s very large-for­mat pho­tog­ra­phy demands close atten­tion to detail. At such a high res­o­lu­tion, you can pay that atten­tion, look­ing right into the win­dows and observ­ing the peo­ple behind them. View­ers, as the work’s descrip­tion says, “should keep hav­ing tena­cious ques­tions that ask who the char­ac­ters are, why they show tense expres­sions on their face and what their sit­u­a­tions are.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Nation­al Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Art­work Freely Avail­able Online

Down­load Hun­dreds of Free Art Cat­a­logs from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

Free: The Guggen­heim Puts 65 Mod­ern Art Books Online

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Punk Meets High Fashion in Metropolitan Museum of Art Exhibition PUNK: Chaos to Couture

in Art, Design, Museums, Music | May 30th, 2013

What­ev­er else British punk rock gave pop cul­ture, it was always a rev­o­lu­tion in fash­ion, engi­neered by Sex Pis­tols sven­gali Mal­colm McLaren and his part­ner, design­er Vivi­enne West­wood. The two pio­neered punk’s S&M‑inspired look from their Chelsea bou­tique, SEX, a one­time record shop that mor­phed into the epi­cen­ter of Lon­don street fash­ion. McLaren passed away in 2010, but his for­mer part­ner West­wood is still designing—only now her work is haute cou­ture nos­tal­gia, its shock­ing sneer at uptight British cul­ture a muse­um piece. Her lat­est col­lec­tion, Chaos, revis­its many of the icon­ic designs of the mid-sev­en­ties made famous by the Sex Pis­tols, such as the “tits square” and “cow­boy square” t‑shirts and the ubiq­ui­tous safe­ty pin.

The name of Westwood’s retro lat­est work is reflect­ed in a cur­rent exhi­bi­tion at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art called PUNK: Chaos to Cou­ture, which began May 9th and runs until August 14th. In the video above, cura­tor Andrew Bolton dis­cuss­es the exhibition’s stag­ing of low and high cul­ture crossover. In the press mate­ri­als, Bolton is frank about the con­tra­dic­to­ry aims of punk and high fash­ion:

Since its ori­gins, punk has had an incen­di­ary influ­ence on fash­ion… Although punk’s democ­ra­cy stands in oppo­si­tion to fashion’s autoc­ra­cy, design­ers con­tin­ue to appro­pri­ate punk’s aes­thet­ic vocab­u­lary to cap­ture its youth­ful rebel­lious­ness and aggres­sive force­ful­ness.

This is not the first time Bolton has appro­pri­at­ed punk fash­ion for high art or worked with Vivi­enne West­wood. In 2006, Bolton curat­ed a Met exhib­it called Anglo­Ma­nia (cat­a­log here), which drew its name and inspi­ra­tion from anoth­er of Westwood’s col­lec­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sex Pis­tols Front­man John­ny Rot­ten Weighs In On Lady Gaga, Paul McCart­ney, Madon­na & Katy Per­ry

Mal­colm McLaren: The Quest for Authen­tic Cre­ativ­i­ty

The His­to­ry of Punk Rock

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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