Jane Brody, the health and aging columnist for The New York Times, looks at the healthy, hilarious, social, and therapeutic benefits to having a two-legged companion in the article “Life With a Dog: You Meet More People.”
Hat tip to my mom for sending me this link.
In honor of the 136th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show that starts on Monday, Randy Kennedy of The New York Times takes readers on a dog-art tour of New York City. He has some nice picks spanning sevearal centuries, continents, and mediums, but my favorite aspect of his article is that he’s settled for me my own style guide quandary, something I’ve debated since I began this blog almost five years ago; dog-art has a hyphen. Read Kennedy’s article Sit. Stay. Good Art.
2.12.12 Update: Oops. Dog art is not automatically hyphenayted. Thank you dog artist Leslie Moore for this clarification:
A quick grammatical note from a recovering English teacher: dog art should be hyphenated when the two words are both adjectives modifying a noun, i.e. when Randy Kennedy describes New York City as a “dog-art town.” When the single adjective “dog” modifies the noun “art,” no hyphen is necessary.
Hat tip to my mom, and dog artists Barbara Grossman, and Natalie Timm for sending me links to this article.
As the Occupy Wall Street movement marks its two-month anniversary today by taking to the streets and clashing with police at Zucotti Park, you might be wondering what the super-rich have been up to. It turns out they have been shopping for contemporary art, desperately, as a matter of fact, in search of "tangible" assets in which to store their wealth. Remember, Europe is financially imploding while the 99% revolt, so art, especially art with museum-backed credentials has become very attractive. Massive, graphic, and highly recognizable works, like those on sale at Christie's last Tuesday are hard to misplace like the $600 million that still has not turned up at MF Global.
Two dog- themed pieces were among the lots last week at Christie's. Christopher Wool's 1992 43 x 30" enamel on aluminum panel, Want to Be Your Dog, sold for $1.53 million. Seriously.
That made the final price realized for Yoshitomo Nara's Dogs from Your Childhood at $422, 500 look like a bargain.
If you read this blog regularly you know I am passionate about contemporary art, especially dog art. And million dollar price tags for dog art is thrilling to me. But, reading Souren Melikian's NY Times article on Christie's sale entitled "The Fever Bubbling on Contemporary Art Sales" left me a little queasy. Like 18th-century-July-in-Paris-let-them-buy-dog-art queasy. Thoughts?
Holland Carter writes effusively about Willem de Kooning's long overdue retrospective at MoMA in The New York Times. And MoMA has some fascinating interactive timelines about his work and insights about his methods and materials. And, yes, de Kooning helped define abstract expressionism, but he was a dog artist too.
Benedict Carey of The New York Times recently wrote about several new studies looking at how and why pets, referred to as companion animals by researchers, impact family dynamics so significantly…
Pets alter not only a family’s routines, after all, but also its hierarchy, its social rhythm, its web of relationships. Several new lines of research help explain why this overall effect can be so comforting in some families, and a source of tension in others. The answers have very little to do with the pet. –Read full article "Emotional Power Broker of the Modern Family."
There is also an interactive feature where you can upload a photo of your pet and share stories of your own little power broker here.
In response to yesterday's post about Jeff Koons and his ongoing balloon dog litigation, Kimberly Merrill, sent me her latest work, Bubble Up.
Coincidentally, Kate Taylor of The New York Times also wrote about Koons's balloon dog battles yesterday. The article has some interesting perspectives from copyright lawyers who don't think Koons has a case. The piece also mentions an interesting three-year (1989-1992) copyright case that Koons lost, Roger v. Koons, aka The String of Puppies case.
The photographer, Art Rogers, won an undisclosed amount in damages from Koons. I had no idea there was a whole subset of dog-art-copyright-law.
I wrote about Kimberly Merrill before here and here. I think she is one of the best dog painters working today. Visit her website to see more of her work before she gets a cease-and-desist letter from Koons.
The Wine of St. Martin's Day, 1565, was recently attributed to the master Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Micheal Kimmelman of the New York Times looks at why labels matter when it comes to art.
Click on image to see larger version.
Dogs From Your Childhood by Yoshitomo Nara
It sounds like there are more girls than dogs in Yoshitomo Nara's "Nobody's Fool" show at Asia Society in New York City. But Roberta Smith of The New York Times calls the exhibition a "game changer" and entitles her review of it: "Cuddling with Little Girls, Dogs and Music." Her description alone of Dogs From Your Childhood makes me want to see it:
The dog sculptures low-ball the flawless artifice of both American Minimalist sculpture and Edo lacquer boxes while preserving a loopy elegance leavened with tender touches of reality: note the green canvas collars worn by the three large, friendly white animals converging in the sculpture Dogs From Your Childhood.
Read Roberta Smith's evocative review here. Visit Asia Socity's website for more about the artist, the installations, and Twittering with Nara.
Related links:
Yoshitomo Nara Limited Edition Pup King at Baltic
More Yoshitomo Nara Pup King art, t-shirts, posters and toys are here.
Order Nara's Children's book The Lonesome Puppy here.
Read Matthew Rose's excellent analysis of Japanese pop art and Nara here.
Great flickr set of Nara's work from Tigerlily here.
Cartoonist Joe Sacco thinks "the pet, needy and unproductive…ranks next to the child as creativity's greatest impediment." That has not been my experience. But I take his point. Click on the image below to open it in a new window for greater clarity…
Via The New York Times.
Technically, this photo by James Estrin was taken on September 13, 2010, not 9/11. But remember how 9/11 bled into days, weeks, and then months as we watched the fires burn and tried to figure out the "new normal." How we still got up and made coffee and walked the dog, but also bought bought American flags for the first time in our lives and put them on our cars or in our flower boxes without irony.
My friends and I drank too much and sang patriotic songs at karaoke at the LA Farmers Market. And we made Pat wear a red, white and blue leather-fringed vest up on stage. The vest or "The Vest," as it came to be known, was passed around so every singer could wear it and we all stood up and sang louder and saluted "The Vest" and hugged and kissed and woke up in friends' beds and thought things would never be the same. Then we watched as Letterman stammered back onto his show. And we all gathered at Maeve's for the first SNL. What was going to be funny? I don't remember, but they figured it out. And we stopped drinking as much. And hugging and asking about families back east and if "everyone is all right?" Code for "did you lose someone?" Then came the proposals, the marriages, the moves away. The children born after 9/11 who will never know what it was like before. Or that their parents used to be young and untouchable and had each other instead of family on the couch that day at Van Ness Ave. Hugh, I know you regret not filming it. But I still remember it clearly. I think we ate pasta.
The photo above by James Estrin was originally published in the early edition of The New York Times on Sunday, September 16, 2001, along with his personal account of covering the attacks. Read it here.