Hollywood or bust

For your Saturday pleasure: ten ways the visual arts are following the movies

1. Stacking up a star system:
Thanks Larry, thanks Jay, love Jeff and Damien

2. Revealing behind the scenes
Insider info was the juice of the best Extras on DVDs. Now stop motion rules the day as art museums show us how they do their thing. Here the Dowse reveals back-of-house-moments with Kerrie Poliness.

3. Expanding the box office:
Get used to it. You might be able to get into the permanent collection for free but special exhibitions, you pay every time. Watch out for late night specials and packaging deals. Terrific Tuesdays

4. Setting the scene:
Paul McCarthy in New York with his White snow set and Urs Fischer in LA with his work Josh Smith a reproduction in movie set style of another artist’s studio.

5. Producing trailers:
The new way to promote art exhibitions online. Like the Art of Pop and Ian strange's exhibition Suburban at the National Gallery of Australia.

6. Playing sound tracks:
The iPod put to work giving sounds to the pictures. Z-Trip for Shepard Fairey's exhibition Sound & vision, Unfolding by Janek Schaefer for Future beauty, and at MoMA Tracks allows visitors to select tracks from their own music library to listen to while exploring the Museum or the MoMA App.
 
7. Establishing franchises:
The Guggenheim led the way but now the Louvre and many others are hard at it leveraging their cultural capital.

8. Play it again
When attitudes become form, this time re-jigged for 2013.

9. Credit lines
To everyone. Publications now include everyone from Trustees and preparators to the curator's wife and kids and as for the speeches at openings and there's room for everyone - lets not forget the end credits for Superman when it was released in 1978 took almost eight minutes to run and the credits for Lord of the Rings are probably still running.

10. The book of the show
And no, it's doesn't have top be an art history thesis. The V&A are about to mount an exhibition based on the specially commissioned story Memory palace by Hari Kunzru

And sometimes you don't even have to see the exhibition. Just see the movie of the exhibition. Grab a seat, it's Great Art exhibitions on Screen. Munch, Manet, Vermeer ...
 
Image: Philippe Parreno puts a movie theatre marquee on the Guggenheim

Public elf service

Wellington last week was dominated by Hobbits including a Hobbit Artisan Fair with Elfin weaving, Wizard treats and Goblin snow freeze to go. We even had Barry (Edna Everage) Humphries telling us “Peter Jackson has turned Wellington into the artistic capital of the Southern Hemisphere." (thanks Barry, good to know)

Fortunately Jeweller Karl Fritsch (we suspect not entirely innocently) ended the week on a high note by setting up his own fair in the Hamish McKay Gallery on Saturday. Cadging work from friends and artists Fritsch assembled a candelabra themed show that also included a few of his own brilliant free wheeling efforts. (Thanks Karl).

Set piece

Anyone who lives in Wellington and who's into the arts will have benefited from the generosity of patrons Denis and Verna Adam. You'll very likely have seen them also attending a multitude of art events over the years.

Less well known is the fact that Denis Adam’s brother Ken is the designer of the sets for the early James Bond movies as well as the famous war room from Stanley Kubrick’s satirical film Dr Strangelove or how I stopped worrying and learnt to love the bomb. Apocryphal maybe but it has been said that when Ronald Reagan became President and was admitted to the Pentagon War room he was hugely disappointed. He was expecting something far more stylish and dramatic - something much more like the one in Dr Strangelove - than a regular meeting room.

On a visit to his brother in Wellington we were lucky enough to hear Ken Adam talk about his work with accompanying slides. As an off-course substitute here's a short documentary about him from 1979 featuring some of his best known work including Barry Lyndon that scored him an Oscar.

Image: The war room from Dr Strangelove