By Laura L. Griffin 8/20/12 8:30am

the eight-day week

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To Do Monday: Toy Story

The little one is back from summer camp, and now he’s demanding presents, attention, food … how brief the respite was! Hand him off to the babysitter for one more precious day and stroll around MoMA’s exhibit Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000, gazing upon the modern objects you once fetishized in fancy toy stores, when children were a mere abstract design concept of your own. Enjoy the institution’s ample air conditioning and peek at a Skippy-Racer scooter from 1933, Bauhaus nursery furniture, Lego building blocks, a Slinky and a selection of original pieces from the set of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. After a couple of hours, you’ll remember why you’ve already starting socking away money for little Junior’s Whiffenpoofs tux rentals (Class of 2031!). Read More

By Jessica Shiraz 8/14/12 4:48pm

The Twilight Saga Continues

Robert Pattinson at the New York premiere of Cosmopolis. (Paul Bruinooge/PatrickMcMullan.com)

Robert Pattinson’s Cosmopolis Co-Star Feels His Pain: His Delivered Umami Burgers Get Cold!

“It’s not the sex you think I’ve had—it’s the sex I want. That’s what you smell on me,” Robert Pattinson growls to a co-star in his new film Cosmopolis. In another scene, a doctor performs an exam on Mr. Pattinson in a moving limousine. “Your prostrate is asymmetrical,” the doctor informs the heartthrob.

Though these (real!) lines of dialogue are absurd, they are nothing compared to the farcical spectacle The Observer witnessed outside the Peggy Siegal Company premiere at MOMA last night.

The newly single Mr. Pattinson ventured out wearing an elegant blue Gucci suit. As the retired vampire inched down the red carpet, the swarm of journalists covering the event whipped off their flats en masse and quickly slipped into sparkly, 3-inch heels. This was his first appearance since news broke that his girlfriend, Kristen Stewart, had cheated on him with the married director Rupert Sanders.

Indeed, Mr. Pattinson has been having a very difficult few weeks. Beyond the very public breakup, he hasn’t even been able to go out and buy a burger! Co-star Emily Hampshire and “instant bestie” told us about his hardship.

“We were talking about Umami Burger and he was like, ‘That’s the best burger in the world, but I haven’t been able to go out and get one. I’ve had to have it sent to me and it gets cold,’” Ms. Hampshire lamented. “He copes with it so well, he doesn’t complain. I mean, if I couldn’t have a Umami Burger I’d be complaining.” Read More

By Erica Schwiegershausen 7/30/12 1:05pm

semantics

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At Má Pêche Panel, ‘Curators’ Defend Their Ownership of the Term and Vilify the Plebeians of Tumblr

A well-dressed crowd, including many senior members of the MoMA staff, turned up to contemplate the state of contemporary curation at Friday’s 56th Street Round Table at Má Pêche, hosted by the New York Public Library and Momofuku.

The panelists—Jeremy Geffen, the director of artistic planning at Carnegie Hall, Julia Hoffmann, the creative director of advertising and graphic design at MoMA, Maria Popova, the founder and editor of Brain Pickings, and moderator Elias Altman, the associate editor of Lapham’s Quarterly conceded almost immediately that none of them considered themselves curators—a point which would be interrogated throughout the discussion.

In his introduction to the subject at hand, Mr. Altman noted that the word “curation” has come to be thrown around “more often than a ping pong ball at a fraternity house,” alluding somewhat disdainfully to a dissemination of “curation” to the masses, a phenomenon which he would later attribute to the Internet.  He questioned: “Is the new definition of curation, like, ‘I assemble things on my Tumblr and then I put them up for the world?’ Is that why we don’t want to be called curators?” Read More