Collections: Asian Art

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Last chance to catch our Add-Art show!

Shelley Bernstein on June 2, 2008

Last week I blogged about our participation in Add-Art, the plug-in for Firefox that blocks ads and replaces them with art. We just got an e-mail from Steve Lambert reporting that Add-Art has been downloaded thousands of times since the launch which means our 100 Views of Edo show is getting seen in browsers across the globe. Our show runs through this Wednesday (June 4), so download now and install to catch it. Steve's got a great roster of upcoming curators and it should be fun to see what comes next.

Need help installing or just want a better idea of what all this is about? Check out this tutorial from Steve:

Introduction to Add-Art from Steve Lambert on Vimeo.

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Mashing-up Hiroshige to block ads and Add-Art!

Shelley Bernstein on May 22, 2008

What in the world am I talking about?? Brooklyn-based artist Steve Lambert has developed a plug-in for the Firefox browser that block ads and replaces them with art. There's a lot more about Add-Art (and how great it is) over at C-Monster's blog, so I won't recap here.

We caught up with Steve about a year ago in the comments on the Walker's post about the application and mentioned the Museum would be interested in contributing images to the project. Steve has been updating us with progress reports and then, a month ago, suggested we curate a show for the launch.

Add-Art shows are made up of 8 individual works at 15 different sizes. We needed to present a selection of collection works that would look good in all these different sizes knowing the plugin would randomly present the images depending on what ad space it was attempting to block. Hiroshige's prints are detailed enough to create interesting crops and are already online, so they seemed a natural choice for this project. Joan Cummins, our Lisa and Bernard Selz Curator of Asian Art selected the 8 prints...





...and here's what the Hiroshige mash-up looks like for the Add-Art application.

Add-Art publicly releases today (May 22) and there is a panel discussion at the New Museum this evening. Congrats to Steve and the team and thanks for letting us take part in this great app! Instructions for installing are on the Add-Art site.

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Celebrating Spring in the Japanese Style

Joan Cummins on April 14, 2008

Stepping out of the Eastern Parkway subway station this morning, I was greeted by the most amazing sight: the cherry trees in front of the Museum were bursting with big, puffy pink blossoms. On Friday they had been all brown twigs, but over the weekend they just exploded. It had a dramatic effect on my mood: I went from tired and gloomy to bouncy and optimistic in a split second. And I'm not really the kind of person who oohs and aahs over pretty flowers.

This year, the incredible display of cherry blossoms found around the Brooklyn Museum (especially in the Botanic Garden next door) gains an additional dimension because inside we're featuring a couple of great exhibitions of Japanese art. Obviously, you don't need to be Japanese to appreciate the coming of Spring, but the rest of us can learn a thing or two from the Japanese approach to seasonal change. There's a very ancient tradition in Japan, first practiced by the aristocracy and then later by the whole population, of watching very closely for the changes in nature that mark the transition between seasons and celebrating those changes with poetry and festivals. None of these festivals are as overtly nature-based or as broadly celebrated as Hanami, or cherry-blossom viewing, an occasion for picnics and strolling in groves of trees that were planted for the purpose. Picture an entire country sharing the giddy experience that I just had coming out of the subway, add quite a bit of alcohol and a day spent away from the office, and you have a sense of what Hanami is like.

In Japanese poetry and philosophy, cherry blossom viewing delivers two somewhat contradictory lessons. The sad truth is that cherry trees bloom for only about a week, then they shed their flowers in a wonderful blizzard of petals. The fleeting quality of their beauty is a large part of what's so thrilling and meaningful about it all. In East Asian Buddhism, the flowering of the trees was used as a metaphor for human life in general: a gorgeous, exciting pageant, but woefully short. Buddhists argue that we should seek something deeper and more meaningful, something -- described as "truth" -- that surpasses such temporary, earthly thrills. However, as is often the case, popular tradition takes the Buddhist interpretation of the cherry blossoms and turns it on its head: instead of dismissing the power of ephemeral beauty, the Hanami festival embraces it and suggests that we all enjoy ourselves now because we cannot know what tomorrow brings.

When you see cherry blossoms in Japanese art -- and you can find them in several prints in the exhibition, Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770-1900, open through June 15, 2008 -- they can represent all the youth and optimism of Spring, but they can also represent the fleeting nature of life, a more pessimistic view. This kind of complex symbolism might seem like a bit of a downer to those of us who are just out to enjoy the view, but it's what makes for great art. So the next time you see a Japanese image that pairs an image of a beautiful young woman with a branch of blossoming cherry, think about what the hidden message may be. But there's also no harm in enjoying the beauty while we've got it.

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