Picasso’s Blowjob Painting Coming to the Met

“Erotic Scene,” “La Douler,” “The Pain” or, as Gawker commenters call it, PaBLOW Picasso’s BLEW Period painting will be displayed at the Met along with all the rest of their 300+ Picassos. Apparently, the controversy wasn’t about the work’s authenticity or “think of the children!” getting an eyeful of fellatio, but, according to Met curator Gary Tinterow, the museum hesitated including the work in the upcoming exhibition because “it’s not very good.” The painterly dirty doodle was a joke between friends, painted in “1902 or 1903 in Paris or Barcelona” at Picasso’s “poorest.” About the so called X-rated painting, Picasso has written: “I’ve done worse.” Does that mean someone, somewhere may have a stockpile of Picasso porn and isn’t sharing?

The Met is the Matrix

The New York Times is drooling over the Met’s innovative 3D imagining practices. It’s not the future any more, not for a while now. I’m worried. The 3D imagining pioneers headed by the Met’s “resident futurist” Ron Street, are busy replicating the museum’s ancient treasures, translating microscopic details into digital bits. Read more »

SW!PE This: Met Museum Guards Make an Art Magazine

A group of Met guards got organized and delivered Volume 1 of their new art journal – “SW!PE Magazine: Guards’ Matter,” featuring creative works of 35 guards in all mediums that can be bound to their softcover glossy, which sold out at the accompanying art show last week. Read more »

“Saint Michael the Archangel” Falls From Grace

If it’s not cranes, falcons, or wind swept construction materials falling from the sky, it’s 15th Century religious art:

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art is saddened to report that late last night or early this morning, a late 15th-century glazed terracotta relief sculpture of “Saint Michael the Archangel” by Andrea della Robbia (1435-1525), came loose from metal mounts.”

The museum claims the piece has not been “irrevocably harmed,” and will be repaired, although, as CultureGrrl notes, they made the same claim about the Tullio Lombardo sculpture of Adam that fell in 2002, an it “hasn’t been publicly spotted since.” |ArtsJournal|

Villainous Fashion Exhibit Based on Superheroes

Today, the “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” exhibit opens at the Met. It features all sorts of strange outfits that are somehow tied to the superhero or as this block of philosophical wordage puts it, “Fashion not only shares the superhero’s metaphoric malleability, but actually embraces and responds to the particular metaphors that the superhero represents, notably that of the power of transformation. Fashion celebrates metamorphosis, providing unlimited opportunities to remake and reshape the flesh and the self. Through fashion and the superhero, we gain the freedom to fantasize, to escape the banal, the ordinary, and the quotidian. The fashionable body and the superhero body are sites upon which we can project our fantasies, offering a virtuosic transcendence beyond the moribund and utilitarian.” The kinky, post-Apocalyptic, nipple-bearing costume is classified as The Armored Body, inspired by Iron Man no less.