A Quick Trip to the Nascar Hall of Fame

“In short, I was impressed. Glory Road, the sweeping exhibit that greets fans as they enter the museum’s Great Hall, features 18 classic Nascar vehicles parked on a track whose banking gradually increases as the cars progress into the modern era. It’s the museum’s green flag, in a sense, and it offers a neat snapshot of the history of stock car racing. Not surprisingly, cars from the sport’s earlier decades — back when they actually looked like stock cars, in other words — were the highlights. Favorites included Herb Thomas’s 1952 Hudson Hornet, Fireball Roberts’s 1963 Ford Galaxie and the Plymouth Belvedere in which Richard Petty won 27 races, including 10 in a row, in 1967.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703964104575335301840480246.html

The Museum of Modern Art attracted its highest-ever number of visitors, 3.09 million, during its 2010 fiscal year, according to estimates released Monday by the museum. (The tally is an estimate because the museum’s fiscal year does not end until June 30.) The figure represents an increase of 250,000 over the previous year’s attendance, and a 530,000 increase over the museum’s first full year of operation in its new building (fiscal year 2006).

Architect:Frank Gehry
Structure:Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain
Year Completed:1997
Number of Votes:28
By Peter Knaup

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/08/architecture-survey-slideshow-201008

Vanity Fair asked 52 experts to choose the five most important works of architecture created since 1980, they named a staggering 132 different structures. Here are the top 21, in order of popularity.

“The Guggenheim Museum has become the emblem of the northern Spanish city of Bilbao and its main tourist attraction, but now attempts to spread its magic by building an extension in a nearby nature reserve have run into fierce opposition.

Provincial authorities want to call an international competition for a museum extension in the bucolic surroundings of the coastal Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve, 25 miles from Bilbao, hoping it will help boost the local economy in the same way the Guggenheim helped Bilbao.”

“That was part of the reasoning when officials at Kidspace Children’s Museum, bowing to economic realities, opted to put on hold an ambitious $20million, 9,000-square-foot building and instead create a Physics Forest that will feature 10 to 15 new exhibits in a naturally landscaped area shaded with transplanted native trees.”

“YouTube Play, which launched Monday, is a partnership between the video site and the renowned art museum. It invites users to submit their short creative videos at http://youtube.com/play. The top 20, chosen by a jury of professional artists, will be on view this fall at Guggenheim museums around the world.”

The 3/6/9/12 rule:

No computer screens before age 3, no internet before age 6, no electronic gaming until age 9 and no unsupervised internet before age 12.

“Killer Ring” By Tobias Wong, Photo Courtesy the New York Times

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Tobias Wong. Tobias was a young artist / designer living in New York City. Tobias blurred the lines between Art and Design and made us more aware of the american consumer culture.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/06/27/style/20100627WONG.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/fashion/27Wong.html

“The exhibit and the plan provide a call to action on climate change,” said the Nature Conservancy’s Bob Moseley, speaking Friday at a joint launch for the show and the Climate Action Plan for Nature he helped create. “But the impact of the many things we can and should do will not be felt for another 50 to 100 years.”

After months of deliberation, New York-based firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro was named Wednesday to oversee the long-awaited design plan for the new Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Downtown Berkeley.