Fine Art meets....Football?

Seems as if friendly Superbowl wagers have moved beyond friends, family and co-workers and created a rivalry between city museums as well!

The New Orleans Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art have each wagered a piece from their permanent collection--albeit temporarily. If the New Orleans Saints win, Indianapolis has agreed to send The Fifth Plague of Egypt, a landscape by J.M.W. Turner, for three months.

If the Indianapolis Colts crush the Saints (I have to stand by my fellow Midwesterners!), the NOMA will send Ideal View of Tivoli by Claude Lorrain.



The choice of the work to be wagered was the subject of some friendly trash-talking between the two museums' directors. It seems that when John Bullard, the director of NOMA offered a portrait by Auguste Renoir, IMA director Max Anderson called it "sentimental blancmange" by a "China painter," referring to Renoir's job painting fine china. Bullard retorted that NOMA didn't have any "farm scenes or portraits of football players" to send to the IMA.


At least if the Colts lose, the IMA still gets to send a "plague," of sorts, to New Orleans.

New Feature: Museum Shop Madness

As long as I can remember going to museums, I've loved the gift shops. Lately I've noticed museum gift shops stepping things up a bit and instead of being the random assortment of art-related key-chains, posters, and coasters at the end of a blockbuster exhibition (though of course, all those things are still available...who needs a coaster set of Monets?), they've become well, shops in their own right.

In this new feature, I'm just going to post things at online museum shops that happen to catch my eye, the wonderful, the weird, the colorful, and occasionally the useful. Enjoy!

First up, this fantastic Dual-Spout Chinese Porcelain-inspired teapot from the Met:











According to the item description: "Our teapot is based on an original made in China in the late 17th century containing two chambers, one for brewing tea and one for hot water; an ingenious and elegant form allowing a harmonious couple to enjoy different strengths of tea simultaneously." Cool. Buy it here.

Next, in the "slightly weird and creative" category, a book entitled When Pigasso Met Mootisse from the Morgan Library's store:








I think this is self-explanatory. Pick it up for the child in your life (or yourself, because you know you want it) here.

This next item, a carved wood necklace from the Art Institute of Chicago's store, is a piece of jewelry I'd actually wear, and very on-trend with this season's statement necklaces. As a bonus, it doesn't look too "museum-y" the way a lot of museum shop jewelry tends to:



Just think how amazing it would look with a plain t-shirt and a snappy blazer. It's even on sale for web orders only.

For the creative interior designer, MoMA's design shop always has a selection of weirdly beautiful things you never knew you even wanted, like this vaguely mushroom-cloud shaped Nesso Table Lamp:











Based on the lamp in MoMA's collection by Giancarlo Mattioli, if you ever wanted a lamp made from injection molded ABS thermoplastic, this is the lamp you've been looking for, if you've got an extra $375 ($337.50 for MoMA members) on hand.

Finally, if you really want to break the bank on a unique look for your living room, try the Gehry Easy Chair from the Philadelphia Museum of Art's store:














For a mere $730, you could own this. Or complete your living room set with matching molded sofa, bench, left, right and 3-sided twist cubes, an easy chair and a coffee table. Gehry-riffic!


So what do you think? Would you buy any of this stuff? What are your favorite museum gift shops?

Angels and Demons and the End of Good Taste

Everyone has to go over to my friend Jenn's blog Per Omnia Saecula to read her brilliant review/synopsis of Angels and Demons, which we saw together over the weekend. It is even funnier than the movie, which would be difficult, considering it's probably the best comedy of 2009.

Angels and Demons comes as the follow-up to The DaVinci Code, which taught us that most, if not all, Renaissance art contains some sort of symbolic code, and is more likely than not, connected to a shadowy secret society. If you just can't get enough, Dan Brown's next book The Lost Symbol (which already has a tentative movie release date of 2012) is available for pre-order on Amazon. According to his editor, Dan Brown's new book is "full of surprises." A different secret society? A new sultry, foreign, but ridiculously intelligent love interest? Which well-known Renaissance artist has Brown invented a shadowy past for this time?

Feel free to weigh in on Angels and Demons here!

Plague Vampire Unearthed in Venice

I had to post about this story because it involves two of my favorite things--plague and vampires.

Italian researchers believe they have unearthed the remains of a female "vampire" in a 16th century Venetian plague mass grave. The woman was buried with a brick in her mouth, a technique believed to stop vampires from "feasting on plague victims" after their death. This is the first forensic evidence researchers have that supports the medieval belief that it was actually vampires that were behind the spread of illnesses like the plague.

Like a lot of medieval supernatural beliefs, the superstition has a perfectly natural explanation. Medieval people believed vampires were behind the spread of pestilence due to their lack of understanding of the decomposition process: they uncovered recently deceased corpses to discover their hair still growing and (stop eating anything you might have in your hand here) blood coming from their mouths, and assumed these were sure signs of plague-related vampirism.

A more detailed article, with some interesting trivia about the "shroud-eaters" of yore appeared in the Times as well.

More photos of the excavation here. Happy Friday everyone!

Zed the Mammoth from La Brea

When I was just a wee child, my ultimate career goal was to be an archaeologist because I was a huge dinosaur geek.

I'm still sort of a dinosaur geek, which is why I'm posting this, even though it's not totally art-related. Researchers from the Page Museum, while digging in an underground parking garage of LACMA (see? art-related.) found a mammoth skeleton in 2007 that they've named Zed, who is complete save for one missing leg. They've recently started excavating his bones.

They also found the skeleton and the skull of a prehistoric American lion, bones of wolves, saber-tooth cats, ground sloths (which are the coolest of all North American megafauna), bison, and a bunch of late Pleistocene era insects, plants, and sea creatures.