American Voices at the Whitney Museum

The American Voices audio tour at the Whitney Museum is likely a better resource if you are actually at the Museum in front of the work being discussed. The images that go along with the online tour are pretty small. The advantage of the site is that you can hear the narration at the same time that you read the text.

You can always search the web for a better image of the artwork - this often leads to more art-related sites and more links but that's part of the fun.

One warning - do not click on the link at the upper left of the screen. It leads to a blank screen. It's better to go back to the introduction page, or click on the index. There you'll find a chronological listing of the artwork in the tour along with thumbnails. I found this intriguing since I hadn't heard of many of the artists (for instance, Elsie Driggs) so seeing a striking image first, and then discovering the artist was part of the adventure.

The National Screen Institute's Film Festival

Japan is one of the current crop of films being shown  at the National Screen Institute's Online Short Film Festival. Filmmakers are encouraged to leave their films on the site after the current festival play is finished and, since this is a really lovely film, I hope it remains there.

The film archive has films from the last five years so there is quite a variety to choose from. Films can be chosen by genre or sorted by director or title. I'd like to see an index by province as well, so I can see which films are included from Nova Scotia. I found the animated film Watchmaker because it was mentioned in an article in the local newspaper but that doesn't help me find other films from this area.

Damien Hirst and that diamond skull

Now, Damien Hirst would be the type of artist who I would expect to dislike instantly, since he's done such outrageous works. Except I like the idea that he calls a dead shark in a tank art, and he gets away with it. The Wikipedia entry about Hirst is really quite good and has links to longer articles about several of his artworks.

I sort of thought Hirst would be like those art students (anyone who has taken an art class has met at least one) who are so pretentious that you want to tell them that their art is really awful. Then I found a couple of videos showing interviews with Hirst, and surprisingly, I liked him. First is a BBC interview about the diamond and platinum skull he did in 2007. The second, embedded below,  is a 2008 Channel 4 interview about the Golden Calf.

Ron Mueck at the Brooklyn Museum

The webpage for the Ron Mueck exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum has only large three images of sculptures for the show from 2006/2007. The other resource material provides some really useful links, accompanied by 'explicit nudity' warnings.

'Behind the Scenes' links to a Flickr album with details of several of the installations. 'Teacher Packet' "provides detailed information about the sculpture Two Women and about Ron Mueck". 'Q&A' allowed people to ask questions of the artist. 'Video' links to a short Quicktime movie about another sculpture. (No, I'm not giving the URLs. Go to the exhibition page and explore from there.)

There once was a link to the full video at blip.tv.  As for the video, I'm not quite sure why the Brooklyn Museum link is no longer active, or why it's where it is on blip.tv, but it gives a great, detailed description of the construction of one of the sculptures in the show. It seems like Mueck's sculptures generally are either oversize or undersize, but the amount of work he puts into accurately depicting the human form is quite marvellous.

The review in the New York Times is still on the web and it gives a helpful description of the exhibit.
The Wikipedia entry for Mueck is quite brief but it has at least one very good image. Some of the links are worth exploring.

A Google search found a few good things, especially this video at metacafe, which would be embedded below except that Blogger didn't like the code I copied .