Fellow blogger Matt Gipson brought it to my attention that some funny things had been turning up in the Miller House archives.

Eero, the Miller House gremlin

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Filed under: Musings

With the Indianapolis Colts going to the Super Bowl and the Vancouver Olympics this month, I have been all about sports lately. I type this while watching Lindsey Vonn ski perfectly and gloriously to the first U.S. gold medal in the Alpine event. A few weeks ago, while our beloved Colts were preparing for the big game, the Indianapolis Museum of Art was all atwitter over a bet developing between our fearless leader, Max Anderson, and the New Orleans Museum of Art’s John Bullard. You know how the story ends: we lost the game, and now the IMA prepares to ship off our beautiful Turner to NOMA. You can read the whole story as described by the instigator Tyler Green.

But why was it such a surprise to everyone (ESPN, bloggers, sports fans) that museum folk are sports fans, too? Sports are generally seen as incongruous with arts, even by me, but a tweet by my former professor Jenny Mikulay got me thinking about sports in a different light.

“I don’t understand it when people think sports/games and art/culture are unrelated–they are the same.” -JGMikulay

This is such a wise statement, albeit one which might be difficult to agree with when standing in the midst of a beer-soaked, blue-clad screaming throng. Yes, inebriated with culture!  But why do we apportion sports within culture in this way? Games, a natural occurrence in most children’s lives, are an excellent way to learn about relationships and strategy and can develop over hundreds of years or be invented spontaneously. They are a physical manifestation of artistic communication. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Art, Musings

The Pharmacy prescribes the following links to combat Monday online anemia.

insanewiches.com

Blog: insanewiches

So a few weeks ago, we introduced you to scanwiches. And because we know you’ll be spending most of this week trying to come up with creative ways to use your Thanksgiving leftovers, here’s a little more inspiration: insanewiches.com.

ArtBabble Video: Nic Hess’s Spindle Implosion

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Filed under: Art, New Media

I fell in love with Willem Kalf’s painting, below, after watching the ArtBabble video In the Gallery: Mark Doty. Mark is a poet who toured the gallery and talked with staff about various works in the galleries and how we see paintings. The way he described the work was particularly appealing to me.

And you can see how, I mean, it’s painted, this bravura, I mean this coil and the light and then the incredible translucency of the peeled fruit. It’s hard to imagine now how it must have looked... Well, we are always going to be looking at and celebrating that the stuff of the world, you know.

Still Life with a Chinese Porcelain Jar by Willem Kalf

Recently, this work  has caught my attention again, as I’ve had the opportunity to spend a bit of time in the galleries here at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. I love the process of “getting to know” a work of art; the way it becomes like a familiar friend, and yet somehow, each time completely delightful and new.  It has me thinking about what catches my attention in each one, and some similarities between the very disparate works that I love. The first thing to come to mind? FOOD. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Art, Musings

What’s working for the @NatHistoryWhale that makes me want to visit the American Museum of Natural History?

I have the distinct pleasure of being in Daniel‘s class this fall, Museums and Technology.  While it is surprising for my classmates that I would take a class about something I do already, I am excited for the opportunity to explore more thoroughly the meaning of technology for the museum experience and how the visitor is affected by these changes. I see continual parallels between issues encountered with visitors in physical space and issues we are encountering all over again in our digital spaces. I’ve talked about Twitter before and I have been thinking about how it is harnessed by museums and where we are going wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Marketing, Musings, New Media, Technology