The New Museum's "Museum as Hub" space, on its fifth floor, currently hosts a massive, vibrant overflow from "Ostalgia," the current exhibition of Eastern European art. One finds, in particular, an overwhelming timeline of the fall of the Soviet Union produced by the St. Petersburg collective Chto Delat. It includes enough information for hours of education.
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I love Philadelphia. I moved to this gritty, bike-friendly city last September to be with my wife, Theresa Rose, who works in the city's Percent For Art program, which commissions public projects. That makes me an Amtrak commuter to New York—an expensive trip, but one that's great for reflecting or even that ancient pastime, reading.
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Consider this quality day trip. Head over to MoMA and let the combination of the Harun Farocki and Francis Alÿs shows bowl you over. These are artists who, using completely different approaches, touch upon a condition of the 21st century—that "all the world's a stage."
Watching Farocki's films, one is immediately attuned to Shakespeare's truism. The artist edits found footage into critiques of virtual war, remote missile guiding systems, prison surveillance and military training programs-all the footage in the world already exists; the filmmaker need only find and edit it. Farocki narrates the conditions of power already present in the image itself. It's a powerful recontextualization.
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I just returned from my honeymoon in Barcelona to the sticky streets of my hometown, Philadelphia. My wife and I skipped the madcap opening of the Venice Biennale, instead looking for peace in the phenomenal Catalonian city-which, of course, is experiencing major political upheaval, and had simultaneously won a premiere league football championship over Manchester United. With 40% of citizens between 18–24 unemployed, Spain has erupted, like Greece, into a full-on brawl as the state considers austerity measures.
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