#nycartsimmersion

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This is when you know you’re on Broadway (in the greatest city in the world (on a perfect day) (and Andrey isn’t here))

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I ran into the set of the movie Life Itself (starring Olivia Wilde, Samuel L Jackson, and Oscar Isaac) on a street in West Village. I snuck in and ended up talking to the producer for about an hour. They were filming a scene with Olivia and Oscar which I got to watch from a few feet away. It was incredible to see what work goes into a scene from behind the camera and to learn from an experienced producer how a take is filmed and directed. I also talked to a paparazzo who had a lot to say about the industry and about how still photography is dying out as a medium.

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Discoursing with Raul de Nieves about his piece at the Whitney was a dream come true. It was incredible to be able to meet an established artist and to have the artist himself discuss his creative process was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

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This is a Mihrab in the Met museum, originally from Isfahan, the home city of Cameron, my museum partner on Monday, which already feels like 3 weeks ago. A Mihrab is the semicircular niche in a mosque that marks the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca. A few questions: How did this get here? The museum is a strange repository of exotic things. It hardly reveals how the things are acquired, what interests (financial and political) are shielded within the objects, what exhibition and visibility do to the fragments on display, whether they illuminate or obscure a supposedly collective history or culture? How did a Mihrab from Isfahan get inside the low-lit Metropolitan Museum? What does the work Metropolitan connote?

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MAGIC AND SPARKLY STARS AND JOSH GROBAN OH MY

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the experience economy

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Henry Taylor, A HAPPY DAY FOR US (2017), at the Whitney

This painting feels like a nice way to end my tumblr report from NYC. Before we went to the Biennale yesterday, a speaker came to talk about the Aeroscene and future humans’ ambition to occupy air.

I lean more towards Henry Taylor’s kind of flight. Gold wings on the ground, potentially taking off, decidedly aware of the dark weight of history. The flowers, too, beautiful and uprooted, capture the violence embedded in hopeful discourses on flight, progress, conquest of nature. These winged angels' happy day is perhaps a walk in time.

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Anicka Yi works in fragrances. In 2015, for a show at The Kitchen, she took swabs from 100 women, collaborated with an MIT biologist to nourish the bacteria in an agar billboard and posed the question “What does feminism smell like?” I have a feeling the show mortified and exhilarated many.

Yesterday at the Biennale, she showed a 3D film on a quest for a mythical plant in the Brazilian Amazon. The searchers are flavor chemists with their typical rainforest gear and colonialist swagger.

Without the 3D glasses, the images look blurry, trippy, incoherent. But that reflects how history is hard to see.

I lay on the mattress and watched the film several times. You could sense the floor vibrate each time the music surged or fellow viewers giggled. What a strange pleasure to lie down with strangers and watched plants scintillating like a disco ball, syringes injected into plump fruits, chemists turning into dead material, mythologies compounding mythologies.

But I wouldn’t have noticed Yi’s “ethnic” name and demanding work if I hadn’t previously seen her name in the 2016 Hugo Boss prize announcement. I keep having to remind myself of what directs, manipulates and excites my attention. It’s hard not to feel like a lot of what I’ve come to find beautiful and meaningful the result of largely chance and economy.