You call it collecting. I call it hoarding. The New Museum calls it art and has a captivating exhibition devoted to it. Titled “The Keeper,” the show fills three floors and a lobby gallery with hundreds of thousands (!!!!) of mostly small objects and images gathered, sorted, arranged and recorded by some 30 retentive artists — keepers — over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st.
Here is just a small sample of what's on view:
- The Auschwitz Notebook - the only visual record...
You call it collecting. I call it hoarding. The New Museum calls it art and has a captivating exhibition devoted to it. Titled “The Keeper,” the show fills three floors and a lobby gallery with hundreds of thousands (!!!!) of mostly small objects and images gathered, sorted, arranged and recorded by some 30 retentive artists — keepers — over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st.
Here is just a small sample of what's on view:
- The Auschwitz Notebook - the only visual record of the camp's atrocities, with dozens of scenes dutifully recorded by an anonymous inmate, found stuffed in a bottle after the liberation of the camp
- A woman who photographed every house in Poland
- 3,000 found photographs of people holding a teddy bear, framed and hung over every inch of every wall in the room
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SUMMARY:
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- WHAT: Things. Thousands and thousands of things.
- WHO: Works by some well known artists, but also concentration camp victims, Polish grandmothers, a real estate agent, and several insane asylum patients.
- IS IT DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND: Not at all, it's purely visual bliss, no art historical knowledge needed.
- CAN WE HAVE LUNCH AT THE LOWER EAST SIDE AFTERWARDS: If you insist.
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[As always, feel free to invite whomever you wish!]
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