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Joshua Frankel’s Art at Moynihan Train Hall Is Lost Among Ads

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At Moynihan Train Hall, Joshua Frankel’s piece functions, whether he wants it to or not, as another ad for us to ignore.

Zendaya, the stunning actress, hovers in front of the great Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre, her black cape spreading out to echo the classical statue’s white wings. “BEAUTY IS A LIVING ART,” reads the tagline, in this sleek ad for Lancôme cosmetics playing across the 160-foot width of the video screens in Amtrak’s Moynihan Train Hall.

Those screens, four of them, then display some stills, rather less sleek, of the N.F.L. quarterback Jalen Hurts in his green Eagles jersey, with copy that proclaims “HULU HAS LIVE SPORTS.”

And finally they’re filled with a hand-drawn animation, in scrawly white on black, of a crowd of figures crossing and recrossing some empty urban space.

You guess at the text that might follow: “Citibank: By New Yorkers, For New Yorkers.”

Or maybe: “Zoloft: For When You Feel Lost in the Crowd.”

Video ads for Lancôme cosmetics playing across the video screens in Amtrak’s Moynihan Train Hall make it hard to concentrate on the art video. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

And then you spot the actual copy, briefly splashed across the leftmost screen: “JOSHUA FRANKEL: WITHIN THE CROWD THERE IS A QUALITY.” With no corporate name in view and a text that’s more than a little opaque, the right savvy viewer might recognize this as art.

Frankel’s 42-second animation, alternating with just over 14 minutes of ads, is in fact the latest offering in the Moynihan Train Hall Public Art Program, which presents permanent works by major figures such as Kehinde Wiley and Stan Douglas as well as temporary pieces like Frankel’s video art, which will be on the hall’s screens through Nov. 14 as part of the Art at Amtrak series. Frankel will be followed on the Moynihan screens by a roster of leading artists that includes Shahzia Sikander, a Pakistani American inspired by Persian and Indian miniatures, and William Kentridge, the South African famous for his socially conscious animations.

Those screens themselves prove how central video is to our culture: It has become ever-present on our phones and TVs, in our stadiums and bars — and even in our train halls. That ubiquity has also made video the medium of choice for some of the best art of the past few decades. Landmark video pieces like Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” or Arthur Jafa’s “Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death” take our normal screen experiences and push them to new and surprising places.

A video by Joshua Frankel, “Within the crowd there is a quality.” The artist sourced its images in the city’s public spaces, selecting 25 characters.

The challenge for Frankel’s video is to do that in the train hall, and it can’t. His animation, so sensitive and unassuming, looks like just the kind of handcrafted imagery a bank or a drugmaker would deploy to humanize its public image — to set it off, for instance, from the gloss of luxury cosmetics. Frankel’s piece matches our expectations for screen-play rather than transcending them, which means we’re not likely to notice it at all. And indeed, over the course of something like 45 minutes of observation in Moynihan on a busy Friday evening, I was unable to spot a single traveler giving Frankel’s work more than the most passing glance.

But that’s not Frankel’s fault.

I couldn’t spot anyone in the hall taking in any of the other imagery that played across its four giant screens either, whether in an ad for a car, a delivery service, a blockbuster movie or for Amtrak itself. Now that smartphones allow us to program our screens with content we’ve actually chosen, we’ve gotten better than ever at ignoring content chosen by companies and ad execs, on screens we can’t control. Instead of having to compete for our attention, you might say that Frankel has to compete for our inattention — a much harder task.

Like lots of critics, curators and artists, I’ve always thought it made a lot of sense to insert video art, or art of almost any kind, into our everyday lives and communal spaces. It’s been at least 70 years, in fact, since the art world started talking about collapsing the gap between art and life, and I’ve been one of its more recent talkers. But Frankel’s piece has got me rethinking that.

I have a feeling his video would have had a lot more impact and meant a lot more to me — would have gotten a far longer look, from anyone who saw it — had it been shown in a space custom-made for us to think artistic thoughts. I’d go so far as to say that such context is pretty much what makes art, art: Hang Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” in a public washroom, and it’s just a urinal; put the Mona Lisa on a poster, and it’s probably working as décor or a souvenir, not as the subject for truly artistic contemplation. You might say that any picture or object is only really art when it’s busy functioning as that, usually because there’s some clue to tell us that’s what it is. And up on the screens at Moynihan, Frankel’s piece functions, whether he wants it to or not, as another ad for us to ignore. The next videos in the Art at Amtrak series will face the same challenge. We’ll have to see if even the famous animations of William Kentridge will manage to meet it. It seems likely that they, too, will meet eyes so skilled at looking away from ads that there’s no getting them to look at art that fills the same space.

Art has to stand out as signal from the noise of all the non-art out there. In a public setting like Moynihan Hall, only something unavoidably radical would have a chance of doing that. Frankel’s subtlety just leaves his piece drowned out. But would corporate titans stand to see their ads screened alongside art that’s wild enough to outshine them? A video that aims to be our era’s Victory of Samothrace might cast shade on a Lancôme lipstick.

 

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40 Random Bits of Trivia About Artists and the Artsy Art That They Articulate – Cracked.com

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40 Random Bits of Trivia About Artists and the Artsy Art That They Articulate  Cracked.com

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John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, dies at 96 – CBC.ca

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John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, dies at 96  CBC.ca

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A misspelled memorial to the Brontë sisters gets its dots back at last

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LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.

More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.

The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.

They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.

“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”

It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.

Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”

Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.

“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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