King-Sized Prank: Having Fun in Front of a Velazquez

The best portraits look as if the subject could step right out of the frame and walk among us, maybe even sign an autograph or two. Recently, something like that happened in the austere galleries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Two nembers of an improvisational comedy group stood in front of Diego Velázquez’s 1623 portrait of King Philip IV of Spain—one claiming to be the king himself (shown above) and the other announcing the king’s presence and willingness to sign autographs for the crowd. Fun, irreverent, oddly respectful, and ultimately harmless, this escapade (or “mission,” as the improvs call it) shows that museums can be places of humor and liveliness and not dread catacombs of culture. Can this king-sized prank and the positive press it’s brought prove to museums that it’s OK to be fun? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "King-Sized Prank."

[Many thanks to Roy for passing on this story to me.]

Flesh for Fantasy: The Nude in Art in America

“[T]he culture of the United States has always been one of massive internal contradictions,” Bram Dijkstra writes in his monumental Naked: The Nude in America, “in which surface harmonies breed countercultures that merely represent the dualistic opposite of the previously dominant cultural pieties.” Dijkstra targets the most “massive internal contradiction” of American society—a puritanically sexually repressed country that produces and consumes behind closed doors more pornography than any other spot on the globe. In Naked, Dijkstra lays bare the counterculture of art celebrating the human body through nude art while simultaneously reflecting the neuroses of the repressive mainstream. To borrow a phrase from Billy Idol, Dijkstra presents “flesh for fantasy” first as the nightmare of Puritanism and, more hopefully, as the perhaps impossible dream of a mature, open society. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Flesh for Fantasy."

[Image: Nan Goldin. Kate Moss on a White Horse. High-Gate Cemetery, London. 2001. Photograph © Copyright Nan Goldin.]

[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with the image above from and a review copy of Naked: The Nude in America by Bram Dijkstra.]

New World Order: The Art of the Americas Wing of the MFA, Boston

Aside from the almost comically anatomically incorrect shark, the aspect of John Singleton Copley’s 1778 painting Watson and the Shark that most catches my eye is the black seaman standing in the boat watching the shark attack unfold before him. With Watson and the shark forming the bottom two points of a triangle, the black figure crowns the peak. Copley originally painted a white seaman with long, flowing hair in that place, but changed to the black figure for the final painting. A copy of Copley’s painting appears in the newly opened Art of the Americas wing of the Museum of the Fine Arts, Boston (exterior view above). Just as Copley reordered the world of his painting and included the often excluded black face, the MFA reorders the world of their American art collection and goes global—mingling more than 5,000 works of art from North, Central, and South America arranged chronologically on four gorgeously redesigned floors. Works often relegated to special sections or (even worse) storerooms, find reintegration into the mainstream flow of art history in an almost sneak attack on the senses. This new world order of the American art world reflects the new reality of modern America. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "New World Order."

[Image: © Nigel Young/Foster + Partners.]

[Many thanks to the Museum of the Fine Arts, Boston for providing me with the image above and other press materials related to the opening of their new Art of the Americas wing. Short videos of the new MFA are available on their YouTube channel.]