I've been on a Rothko kick lately.

Perhaps it's because, aesthetically, I really like how elemental his multiform paintings are. I enjoy the different ways that the color combinations interact with each other, how the painted edges interact with the edges of the canvas, how one shade fades into the next.

I find Rothko's work soothing and interesting to look at. I find it fascinating how the various colors and effects all come together to form a whole, to set a mood.

And with that, here's an artist spotlight — based on five facts that I find incredibly interesting — about Mark Rothko.

1. MARK ROTHKO = MARKUS YAKOLEVICH ROTHKOWITZ 

While Mark Rothko's work was associated with Abstract Expressionism — the first-ever art movement specific to America following the fallout of WWII — the artist himself was an immigrant from Russia.

Markus Yakolevich Rothkowitz arrived at Ellis Island with his mother and his sister in 1913, joining his father and brothers who had already immigrated to the U.S. The family settled in Portland, Oregon.

Markus became a U.S. citizen in 1937, prompted by the rise of Nazi Germany and the fear of a sudden deportation of American Jews. In 1940, when he was 37 years old, he changed his name from Markus Rothkowitz to Mark Rothko.

2. ROTHKO RAN WITH AN ARTSY CROWD.

Rothko spent a lot of time around a who's-who of Modernists — individuals who already were, or who would soon become, celebrated artists in their own right:

• While a student, he took classes with Abstract Expressionist painter Arshile Gorky and was mentored by Cubist painter Max Webber in New York.

• While teaching in New York, he met Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Joseph Sloman, John Graham, and was mentored by Milton Avery.

• He developed a close friendship with Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still, eventually teaching a class with him at the California School of Fine Art along with David Hare and Robert Motherwell. 

However, many of Rothko's artist friends became jealous once his later paintings started bringing him more critical acclaim and financial success. As a result, Rothko's relationships with Newman and Still became particularly strained.

3. MYSTERY MATERIALS

For a long time, science was baffled as to what Rothko put in his paints that allowed his works to achieve such a luminescent quality. But thanks to the Tate Modern and MOLAB (an Italian organization that provides technical support to European conservation projects), the mystery has been solved.

It turns out that Rothko would often modify his paints with a variety of unusual materials, which would all affect the paint's color, texture and drying time. These materials included egg, glue, and several different kinds of resin which increased the viscosity of the paint, making it easier to spread without dulling its color. 

Rothko also constantly experimented with different mixtures and layering sequences, applying phenol formaldehyde to his works to keep the layers from blending into each other — a technique which created much of his works' vibrant colors.

4. FILLING THE SPIRITUAL VOID

Rothko had a tumultuous relationship with religion throughout his life. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household, which meant that his early years in Russia exposed him to the violence and cruelty of the country's anti-Jewish pogroms. When his father passed away after the family's first few months in America, Rothko mourned him at a local synagogue for a year before vowing never to return.

However, the artist remained active among the Jewish community and was a staunch political activist. His time as a student of Max Webber, another Russian-Jewish artist, led Rothko to see art's potential as a tool for emotional and spiritual expression.

By the time Rothko's "multiform" painting experiments had matured into his signature style, he was still flirting with larger spiritual concepts in his art. He spent years studying Nietzsche's writings on mankind's spiritual void, and Jung's work on archetypes as a way to transcend culture and language to a greater collective consciousness.

Rothko's work was now about creating intimate, spiritual experience between the painting and its viewer, for which color was merely an instrument. In his words, Rothko sought to express "basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on...The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them."

His work finally culminated in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Rothko's final paintings were dark, monumental works in deep reds, browns and black, several of which were arranged in a triptych style usually associated with Roman Catholicism. Inside of the chapel, they surround viewers with massive, imposing visions of darkness, transcending specific religious faiths and symbology in order to create a contemplative and deeply individual spiritual experience. 

5. ROTHKO'S DEATH CREATED A SERIOUS LEGAL MESS.

Rothko committed suicide on February 25, 1970, following health problems, a divorce, battles with alcoholism and bouts of depression.

However, prior to his death, Rothko had wavered on what he saw as the purpose of his artistic foundation — the governing body that would handle his estate and control his legacy once he was gone. As with most artistic foundations, its original intent was to parcel out Rothko's work to institutions and collectors who would honor the intentions of the artist's work. But before his death, Rothko had been thinking about the foundation being more of a charity, its purpose to create grants for older, less successful artists.

This intent for the foundation because very important when, three months after his death, the executors of Rothko's estate sold off 100 of the artist's paintings at rock-bottom prices — roughly $12,000 each — to Marlborough Art Gallery, at a time when such paintings were regularly worth at least $50,000 on the open market. Marlborough turned around and sold the paintings for at least $180,000 per painting, all while the executors of Rothko's estate had mysteriously found opportunities to become more actively involved in the gallery: one executor was named director of Marlborough merely five weeks after Rothko's death, another became part of the gallery's stable of artists.

What followed was a legal cluster that shook the New York art world: the executors of Rothko's estate were accused of self-dealing and conspiring to defraud the estate, while Rothko's two children sought to nullify the sales and claim half of their father's estate under New York law (despite their being written out of the artist's will.)

The debate was complex: If the Rothko foundation was, as originally intended, meant to secure Rothko's works in museums and with collectors, then the estate executors had seriously undercut the interests of the foundation — and created a perceived conflict of interest to boot — by selling everything off. However, if the Rothko foundation was remaining consistent with the artist's later, more charitable thoughts for the organization, it would have made perfect sense for the executors to sell off the works to create money that could then be parceled out as grants.

The entire story is fascinating, and can be explored more fully in an online article by David Levine, "Matter of Rothko".

Since we've been doing #Museumpalooza, Tim and I have taken pictures with Tyrannosaurs and/or their close friends and relatives at California Academy of Sciences, Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Natural History Museum of LA County, the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Chicago's Field Museum, just to name a few.

But in the back of my mind, looking at these photos made me wonder: how many of the fossils in these images are actually real?

WAIT...WHAT? OF COURSE THE FOSSILS ARE REAL. (DUH.)

Obviously, dinosaurs (and their fossils) are real things that really existed. But that is not to say that all the fossils in all of these pictures are real.

In fact, quite a few of them are likely casts made from real fossils – that is, molds taken from the outside of real fossils, which are made with anything from plastic to fiberglass.

In the meantime, while the casts are out on display, those real fossils could actually be in a laboratory undergoing rigorous study, or stored in a really cool climate-controlled basement somewhere due to their age/delicacy.

BUT WHY WOULD MUSEUMS DISPLAY CASTS INSTEAD OF ACTUAL FOSSILS?

• Supply and demand. Every natural history museum wants a signature, household-name dinosaur skeleton for their lobby (as well they should) but the reality is that we haven't dug up a lot of complete dinosaur skeletons yet...definitely not enough to go around to every museum that wants one.
  
  What's the solution? Make casts from fossils of existing dinosaur specimens. This allows that dinosaur to be seen and enjoyed at different institutions throughout the world even if it's not there "in the flesh", so to speak.

• Casts really tie the skeleton together. VERY rarely are complete dinosaur skeletons dug up straight out of the ground. Prehistoric scavengers might have made off with a leg, a river might have washed away a vertebrae or three – things can happen during the 65 million year interval between a dinosaur's death and subsequent unearthing.
  
  But do museum visitors really want to see a T-Rex missing its leg, or an Apatosaurus / Brontosaurus that's missing a large chunk of its tail? (Short answer: no.) So casts are often made of the missing bones from another dinosaur skeleton of the same species, which helps fill in the gaps for the specimen who's missing bits of its anatomy.
   

• Fossils can be delicate flowers. While they may have aged for a few millennia, bones are still bones – that is, fragile and capable of breaking, no matter how hard they may appear. 
  
  Plus, dinosaur skeletons in museums aren't held together with duct tape and super glue. Most installations involve some degree of potential damage to the bone: a pin hole for a wire here, a suspension rod there, and of course there's the problem of forcing a few foot/leg bones to bear the weight of the rest of the fossilized skeleton.
  
  That doesn't even cover fluctuating humidity levels in the room, the vibrations caused by passing museum visitors, or countless other external factors...believe it or not, in spite of surviving some 65 million years (give or take), some fossils just can't handle the stress.
   

• Casts are lightweight. Related to "fossils can be delicate flowers", is the fact that fossils – especially fossils of the permineralized variety (where minerals seep into the bones and fill up all the available space) can be very, very heavy.
  
  Weight can make real fossils difficult to display, because they require stronger and more obvious support structures that can take away from the visual effect of the freestanding dinosaur skeleton, especially if you want your dino displayed in striking, dynamic poses.
  
  Take Sue, for instance – the largest, best preserved and most complete T-Rex ever discovered – who lives at the Field Museum in Chicago.

The head on this skeleton of Sue is a cast. Her ACTUAL head is nearby, in its own case on the museum balcony, because her ACTUAL head weighs 600 pounds and can't be supported by the real bones of her fossilized T-Rex neck.

Of course, Sue's head didn't weigh 600 pounds while she was alive, but then her skull wasn't a fossil back then – it was bone, much lighter and easier to move around. Her skull's weight increased drastically once she died and the fossilization process began. In her defense though, when scientists discovered Sue, her skull weighed a full ton – paleontologists got it down to about 600 pounds after removing all the solid rock from her fenestrae (the holes in her skull).

• Fossils may serve a higher purpose elsewhere. Let's say a PhD student barges into your museum because he needs to study your Triceratops specimen's hip so he can turn the entire state of dinosaur taxonomy on its head. (FYI: Dinosaur taxonomy WAS actually [potentially] turned on its head last month, which is absolutely fascinating and which Dustin Growick's "Dinosaur Show" explains far better than I ever could.)
  
  Anyway, your Triceratops hip is currently attached to your museum's Triceratops skeleton, which would involve a lot of expensive de-installation headache to remove, and a second headache whenever the research was finished and the bone had to go back on the specimen. That's a lot of stress on the bone, as well as on the museum installation team. Keeping the cast on display and the real thing in the archives saves that stress.
   

• Casts can look better...AND they can be replaced! Sometimes skeletons aren't all the same color. Sometimes skeletons aren't all from the same animal. Whatever the reason, your fossils look less than visually consistent. So it goes in Hollywood, so it goes in paleontology: plastic to the rescue, for all your superficial anatomical needs!
  
  As an added bonus: if a visiting toddler gets overexcited, slips the barrier and hugs the femur of your resident T-Rex skeleton, never fear! It may have scratched up your cast, but at least no damage was done to that valuable, uber-important REAL T-Rex femur hiding in the basement!

BUT I WANNA SEE ACTUAL FOSSILS...

...and you can, and often do! The good news is that many natural history museums use a combination of real bones and casts in the majority of their dinosaur displays these days. Also, if a specimen is predominantly composed of fossil casts, the museum usually labels them as such. (If they don't, they should.)

But the reality is that museums have to balance the wants and needs of the visitor ("real fossils, right now!") with the safety and well-being of the specimens that they've been entrusted to safeguard. Take heart though – any casts that you see at your nearest museum were, at one point, made from real, fossilized dinosaur bones, and given the choice between seeing actual fossils or not seeing any dinosaur at all...well, I know which I would choose.

BONE-UP WITH FURTHER READING on the actual fossil-mounting process with Ben from ExtinctMonsters.net, or learn about how fossils are actually made with MuseumHack's Dustin Growick.

However, I know next to nothing about Asian art. Like many art historians, my artistic education (with the exception of one course in grad school) has had a prominent Western focus, which I am slowly trying to correct.

That said, the Asian Art Museum was EXACTLY what I needed, because it provided just enough context for me (and/or other less-than-knowledgable viewers) to get a grasp of a gallery's time period or subject matter without coming across as "too wordy" or "too academic".

As a result, I left the Asian Art Museum realizing how much there is about Asian art that I don't know. Most importantly, the museum's approach made me want to go back and learn more, and that's the crowning achievement for any museum in my book.

Here's a rough list of the Top 5(ish) Coolest Things I Saw:

1. INTIMIDATING RELIGIOUS DEITIES

Simhavaktra, also known as "the lion-headed one", is a magical being that inhabits the sky. Her hair blazes upward with the fire of wisdom, and her lion head represents fearlessness.

She also looks pretty badass, which is one of the things I really enjoy about representations of Indian and Chinese deities: so often, they look like gods you just don't want to mess with.

Speaking of gods you just don't want to mess with, let's not forget about Japanese deities. Fudo Myoo, known as "the immovable one", is one of the Five Bright Kings in Japanese Buddhism. Fudo is a manifestation of the central cosmic Buddha, which means his job is to protect Buddhism and its true adherents. This is a serious job, so Fudo has his game face on – complete with sword, rope, and giant flame, the latter of which he uses to purify evil.

2. COOL SCROLL PAINTINGS

On a less-intense note: Over the past few years, I've started developing a soft spot for Chinese and Japanese scrolls and silk screens. I absolutely adore their level of detail, and how "soft" they seem (tonally and stylistically) compared to the modern/Western movements I'm more familiar with, like Abstract Expressionism.

But it's also fascinating to see how exposure to those movements affected those artists practicing the older tradition. Take the blurred, blotty abstractions of the branches in this Red plum blossom work on paper, which was made in the 1980s: traditional scrollwork is very precise, so the bits of abstraction here are a radical divergence from the older style.

I also enjoyed seeing this "wall-facing Buddha", which is apparently a motif throughout Asian art that I'd never come across before. According to one story, Bodhidharma, the very first patriarch of Zen Buddhism, sat in silent meditation in front of a cave wall for nine whole years. (That is a special kind of patience and focus that I do not have.)

This particular story is usually artistically represented with as few strokes as possible – simplicity of form above all else. The above example by Jiun Onko only uses three dry strokes.

Speaking of "simplicity of form", one of the most common images in Zen Buddhist art is the enso, a circle that is drawn with a single brush stroke. But Masako Takahashi's contemporary enso isn't a white brush stroke on a black surface – it's a print of a high-resolution scan of the artist's own hair, which adds an element of personalization to this very symbolic work.

(Of course, beneath the contrasting colors and peacefulness of this image, somewhere in the back of my mind it reminded me of The Ring, which is coincidentally something that also originated in Japan.)

3. FASCINATING KNICK-KNACKS THAT WILL OUTLIVE US ALL

This adorable little guy is over 3,000 years old! Other artifacts show that rhino hunts – the capturing of rhinos for sacrifice during rituals – were major events during Bronze Age China. The statue has an inscription on the bottom that provides firsthand account of society during the Shang dynasty.

GASP! This critter is a spirit guardian, a popular motif in Asian art. It would have been placed outside the door of a tomb or sacred place, to scare off unwanted visitors.

Hailed as one of the "treasures" of the Asian Art Museum, this gilded bronze Buddha is the earliest known Buddha object produced in China, with an inscription on its base that references the year 338.

Let that sink in for a minute: "Earliest known Buddha object produced in China". A date that occurs 500 years after Buddhism was imported from India to China, in roughly the second century BCE.

This little Buddha has seen some things over the past 2,000+ years.

Another cool fact about this statue is that, as the saying goes, "all that glitters is not gold". This statue is actually made out of bronze, gilded (painted) with a thin layer of paste made out of gold and mercury. The bronze figure would have been heated over a fire to evaporate the mercury, leaving the gold bonded to the surface. 

4. ANCIENT BADASS WEAPONRY

Back in "the old days", many Malay and Indonesian men wore a kris, or dagger. While kris are mostly used for ceremonial purposes these days, some are revered for their symbolic associations for turning away flames or floods, or flying through the air to their master's defense.

The blades are usually formed of several layers of red-hot steel, layered on top of each other and pounded thin, before being treated with acid to bring out the intricate patterns resulting from the repeated folding and pounding of its creation. Krises have either wavy or curved blades, and collectors can often recognize which area or island each handle, blade or fitting comes from.

5. ATTACK OF THE MONKEYS

I have no familiarity whatsoever with the Indian epic of Ramayana, but I think I might need to pick it up, because it sounds awesome.

Evidently, in part of the story, the wife of our hero Rama is cruelly abducted by Ravana, the demon king of Lanka. Rama got the local monkeys to join him in his assault on Lanka, to go get his wife back...which sounds like the kind of thing that would make for some badass cinematography today:

Too bad that in the Indian epic, the monkeys don't win. The demon king's brother, Kumbhakarna, kicks some monkey ass, maiming and devouring them by the hundreds. (RIP monkeys.)

Finally, Rama himself joins the fray and cuts Kumbhakarna to teeny tiny bits, thus ending the battle and the needless waste of monkey life.

Big thanks to Asian Art Museum for an awesome afternoon, and for inspiring me to learn more about all the awesome stuff in your collections!

While Museumpalooza-ing in San Francisco, Tim the T-Rex and I paid a visit to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, which focuses on "making the diversity of the Jewish experience relevant for a twenty-first century audience" through innovative and educational exhibitions that frequently rotate every four to six months. 

While we were there, I wandered into the recently-closed exhibit From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art, which turned out to be one of the most thought-provoking museum exhibitions that I've seen in a while.

One of the things I most enjoyed learning about was the academic-sounding, yet legitimately interesting concept of postmemory: "the relationship that the 'generation after' bears to the personal, collective and cultural trauma of those who came before – to experiences they may 'remember' only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right." (via Marianne Hirsch's The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, 2012.)

I really found this whole notion of postmemory intriguing. How is the history that we live with, the history that we as a society and a culture make in our day-to-day lives, affecting not only our view of the world, but our childrens' view of it? How do the "boogeymen" of our past continue to haunt future generations through inherited memory? And most importantly, how do those future generations reflect on, celebrate, or otherwise acknowledge a historical past that they didn't personally experience? 

Take, for example, these Kevlar Fighting Costumes by Nao Bustamante:

These costumes, which look like traditional garments worn by soldaderas during the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s, have been created out of kevlar – a material renowned for being bullet-proof, stab-proof, and frequently used in body armor. The work is a homage to the female soldiers who fought in the revolution.

The juxtaposition between the old (the cut and style of the clothing) and the new (the relatively recent invention of kevlar, which was created in the 1970s) is visually engaging, but it also benefits from a kind of hindsight: if kevlar were around during the Mexican Revolution, how many fewer lives might have been lost? How might the circumstances have changed?

Another interesting note is that not all soldaderas participated in the Mexican Revolution voluntarily. Women were often kidnapped and forced into the army, or threatened at gunpoint to join. In April 1913, the Mexican Herald reported that 40 women were captured by the Liberation Army of the South (known as the "Zapatistas") and pressed into joining the cause. 

So Bustamante's kevlar vests may not just symbolize protection for soldadera women against gunfire and other hazards of combat – it might have also been symbolic protection from the circumstances that drove them into battle in the first place.

Another artist in the exhibit, Binh Danh, explores issues of mortality, memory and history in Vietnam and Cambodia – an area which he and his family were forced to flee when he was very young. Danh instead learned about the Vietnam War through media depictions while growing up in the United States.

In the series Immortality: The Remnants of the Vietnam and American War, the artist used photosynthesis to produce photographic representations of the Vietnam War, which were seen in popular media images, onto the leaves of various kinds of plants. These photos are not printed on the leaf at all, but are part of the foliage itself – the shading and details a result of the plant's photosynthetic response to sunlight. (While each leaf has been coated in resin to preserve the photo for as long as possible, they will eventually fade – a statement in itself about the power of memory.)

One of my favorite works in the exhibition was by another artist who focused on the Vietnam War – Vandy Rattana's photos at first glance seem to be unassuming, picturesque scenes of small bodies of water.

However, these ponds have a dark history: the United States dropped 2,756,941 tons of explosives on Cambodia during the Vietnam War, leaving craters across the landscape. These craters have since filled with still-toxic water, and have been repurposed as natural sources of water by the local population.

It's fascinating to me how these otherwise innocuous images, that many might dismiss off-hand as "just another landscape photo", are imbued with such complex and rich history once you know their background. 

I also think it's interesting to compare the Bomb Ponds series to, say, Anselm Kiefer's Aschenblume, because both artists are having a visual conversation about the impacts of war and the area's continual rebirth. I like that both artists use natural imagery to convey this sense of recovery – Kiefer uses a dried sunflower, Rattana uses the lushness and vibrancy of the actual landscape.

The idea of postmemory is also particularly poignant in this series, because artist Vandy Rattana was not alive during the Vietnam War – he was born in 1980, five years after the conflict officially ended with the fall of Saigon. Yet the complex history and messy outcome of the war still has far-reaching impact on many people who were not directly touched by it, as evidenced by the toxic water in these "bomb ponds" that those in the area now experience as a normalized part of their environment.

However, the work that I was most intrigued by in the From Generation to Generation exhibit was Nicholas Galanin's Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan (We Will Again Open This Container of Wisdom That Has Been Left in Our Care), Parts I and II.

**Exciting sidenote: It turns out that these videos are available on YouTube, so I'm posting them here for context and/or your artistic enjoyment. (All credit goes to the artist.)**

Exploring themes of inheritance and memory, Galanin's work is a two-part video. The first part features a Tlingit dancer, who dances in a traditional Native American costume and mask (complete with raven rattle) to contemporary music composed by Galanin. The second video is a reversal of the first, featuring a contemporary dancer who performs free-form to traditional Tlingit chanting and drums.

I found this work really interesting because it combines older, traditional culture with something more contemporary, and shows that these mash-ups can result in a new kind of art that, while different, can operate within and between the boundaries of "old" and "new".

It also shows that the idea of "inheritance", and perhaps the notion of postmemory, is not necessarily something passed down from an older generation to a younger one, but something that can flow both ways, between generations. 

Major thanks and kudos to the Contemporary Jewish Museum on a fascinating and outstanding exhibition! (And if you missed out on the exhibition and/or would like to learn more about it, you can always buy the exhibition catalog!)

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical naked...”

(Note: Big thanks to the Beat Museum and City Lights Books in San Francisco for providing much of the inspiration behind this article!)

Before there were millennial hipsters – but after the original hipsters – there were Beatniks.

Even if you don't know what a "Beatnik" is, odds are that you could identify one based on a few cultural cues. A 1950s-era Beatnik stereotype would include a black turtleneck and goatee, a beret, a cigarette dangling from two fingers, and an attitude of exasperation about why you don't appropriately appreciate some obscure work of literature, underground music reference, or recent artistic breakthrough.

The Beatniks' attitude was characterized by a general sense of pre-countercultural angst, "a vague feeling of cultural and emotional displacement, dissatisfaction, and yearning," according to Professor Ray Carney of Boston University. And nowhere was this sentiment better characterized than in the shining examples set by two of the Beat movement's predominant founders – Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

ALLEN GINSBERG AND "HOWL"

Ginsberg was the author of "Howl", a three-part poem that runs the gauntlet from the author's personal experiences with his community of poet and artist friends, to radical political statements, to graphic details about his homosexual activity and prolific drug use. The work itself is gritty and raw, and reads like a simultaneous affirmation and rallying cry. The rhythm of the words are reminiscent of jazz, built as it was on a bebop-style beat.

Ginsberg introduced the poem during a late-night, booze-fueled reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Jack Kerouac described the scene (using different names) in his book The Dharma Bums:

"I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six (Six Gallery) that night, which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbrook (Ginsberg) was reading his, wailing poem "Wail" (Howl) drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling "Go! Go! Go!" (like a jam session)..."

Among the attendees of this first reading was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet and founder of City Lights Books in San Francisco. He reached out to Ginsberg the next day and offered to publish "Howl" and a few other poems as the fourth book in City Lights' Pocket Poet series. The limited run of 1,000 sold well enough that an order was placed for more editions.

But on March 25, 1957, U.S. Customs confiscated 520 copies of the book as it was being transported from its printing house in England on grounds of obscenity due to its graphic depictions of drug use and homosexual sex. Ferlinghetti was forced to turn himself into police for knowingly selling an "obscene book". The ACLU paid his bail and contested the legality of the book's seizure even as the scandal made the book both popular and infamous – a third edition was ordered, to be printed in the U.S.

A judge soon ruled that "Howl" possessed social and artistic value, and granted it protection under the First Amendment. This court decision would eventually set the stage for more "risqué" works to be published in the U.S., including the previously-censored Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover.

Following the arrest of its owner and the contentious trial that followed, City Lights bookstore never stopped selling the book.

JACK KEROUAC AND ON THE ROAD

A year after Ginsberg had published "Howl", his friend, Jack Kerouac, decided it was time to get serious about converting his thoughts, anecdotes and stories about his travels with his friend Neal Cassidy into something that was publishable. To that end, he created a 120-foot long typewriter scroll and feverishly wrote the first draft of what would become On the Road in almost three weeks.

There is no shortage of hedonism in On the Road, as the autobiographical narrator (Sal Paradise) and his handsome, care-free friend Dean Moriarty, (the real-life Neal Cassidy) take off on multiple cross-country road trips fueled by sex, drugs, jazz, and the promise of a good time at their next destination.

But inevitably, real-world responsibilities always find a way to cramp the guys' style. Money is always an issue, because jobs inevitably stifle their free-spirited travels. Relationship fidelity, pregnancies, and the demands of "settling down" are rejected again and again by Dean Moriarty, who as the book goes on seems to be looking less for adventure and more for an escape from his previous life choices.

Yet the book is also beautifully-written in a frenetic, "bop spontaneous prose" style that (for me at least) is exhilarating to read. It's served as inspiration to countless other artists, including California-based Ed Ruscha, who printed and illustrated his own edition of the book with photographs of 1950's era cars and other images of the time period. And in my opinion, On the Road is a major influence on the final season of AMC's Mad Men.

This is because, at its heart, On the Road is about the reckless search for the American ideal, and how some people tend to equate that ideal with the achievement of happiness. It's a quest for meaning and self-discovery that reflects a constant, compulsive need to move on to the next thing, perpetually chasing an idea that is always glistening on the far horizon. 

Kerouac/Sal Paradise's journeys with Cassidy/Dean Moriarty take them from San Francisco to Denver, from New York to New Orleans, from Chicago to Detroit, from Los Angeles to Mexico, and everywhere in between. But – much like Don Draper – they somehow always find themselves back in California, seeking enlightenment and gaining perspective.

The critical reception to On the Road was mixed. Reviewers rightly noted that the main characters were two self-absorbed white guys carousing through life without many repercussions, and that their story ultimately doesn't lead much of anywhere. But the written style of the book was hailed as historic. Gillbert Minstein of the New York Times claimed "there are sections of On the Road in which the writing is of a beauty almost breathtaking...there is some writing on jazz that has never been equaled in American fiction, either for insight, style, or technical virtuosity."

And in that sense, both Kerouac's On the Road and Ginsberg's "Howl" became, if not the voice of a generation, the voice of a movement: the literary embodiment of counter-culture ideals that would go on to define 1960's culture in America.

Now that I'm back from my California Museumpalooza (recaps coming soon!), I want to take a few minutes to brag on the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Since the Getty Museum is technically split into two parts, the main Getty Center and the Getty Villa further west, I'm going to clarify that I'm focusing on the Getty Center for the time being.

The Getty Center has an outstanding collection of pre-20th century European paintings, illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, and photographs from 19th-20th century America, Asia and Europe. And I'll delve deeper to that collection in future posts, but what I really want to focus on right now is the center's architecture.

Because the Getty Center is arguably one of the most stunning buildings I've ever visited. 

Thanks to my architecture tour of the facility, I learned that the Getty Center officially opened to the public in 1997, twenty years ago this December. It was created to house part of the massive art collection of J. Paul Getty, noted oil man and one of the wealthiest men in the world as of 1956. The center is also home to the Getty Research Institute, the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust.

The art takes up five of the buildings at the Getty, with four buildings dedicated to the permanent collection and part of a fifth containing temporary exhibitions. (While I was visiting, it contained an interesting exhibit on French draftsman and sculptor, Edme Bouchardon.) Visitors usually arrive at the center via a tram located in the arrival plaza, to better accommodate the steep California hillside.

THE GETTY GRID

The Getty Center was designed by architect Richard Meier, who became the youngest architect to ever win the Pritzker Architecture Prize shortly before receiving the commission to work on this complex. 

One of Meier's goals with the Getty was to create a harmonious blend of landscape and building. To that end, he took advantage of two naturally-occurring ridges in the California hillside and laid two grids along these axes, along which the entire complex can be navigated – the galleries line up along one axis and the administrative buildings along the other. These axes are offset by 22.5 degrees, the same angle of divergence reflected in the ridges that surround the center.

The two grids that Meier imposed upon the Getty Center are composed of smaller blocks of space measuring 30-inches square. All the architectural "building blocks" of the Getty Center, from floor tiles to windows, either measure 30x30 exactly, or come in a larger or smaller variation of this size (60x60 inches, or 15x15 inches respectively). This ensured that every aspect of the facility was built at a consistent, and human, scale.

Our architecture tour guide, Rona, proved this point by asking one of our tour members to stand against one of the Getty's aluminum pillars so the rest of the group could guess his height. Measuring against the pillar, the man was a little over two tiles' tall – so the group guessed his height was six feet. This guess was correct, and we had been able to tell because the height of the two tiles was exactly five feet.

BUILDING MATERIALS

The Getty Center is built out of concrete and steel covered in one of two types of materials: aluminum coated with a thick liquid polymer, and travertine limestone.

The travertine at the Getty was originally quarried just outside of Rome, from the same quarry ancient Romans used for the Roman Colosseum and the Trevi Fountain. When the Getty's architects announced that they were initially looking for a more natural, rougher surface for the facility than the smooth white rock, the owner of the quarry constructed a specialized guillotine that split the limestone slabs along their natural fault lines, revealing the natural roughness of their interior.

The architects were sold on the look and the texture, and it took 100 trips by barge (through the Panama Canal) to bring over 300,000 pieces of individual stone overseas from Italy to complete the center.

Meier's use of liquid-polymer-coated aluminum presented a strong contrast to the travertine. The metal provided him with a material that was less heavy and imposing than the rock, and more capable of producing curved shapes that would play well against the heavy lines of the limestone walls. In fact, the aluminum's flexibility can best be seen in the center's famous "piano curve", pictured below.

This is not to say that the strong lines of the travertine didn't have their use as well – Meier incorporated limestone arches and borders throughout the complex as a way to "frame" many of the vistas of the surrounding hillsides, which emphasize the Getty's impressive views as works of art in their own right. Perched on a hill 900 feet about I-405, it's fair to say that the center offers some of the best views around.

WATER AND SUSTAINABILITY

The central courtyard of the Getty Center is the only area of the complex that breaks with Meier's strict travertine/aluminum rule. The rocks in Boulder Fountain are pieces of granite, over 100 million years old, quarried from the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern California – the heart of gold rush country.

But in addition to travertine and aluminum, another key feature of the Getty Center's architecture is water, as fountains and pools abound throughout the complex. In fact, the Getty has access to almost a million gallons of water in the hill beneath its helipad, which allows California's fire-fighting helicopters to land at the center and refill their tanks in under 40 seconds.

But just because the Getty has a lot of water in a historically drought-stricken state doesn't mean it's not sustainably used. In fact, the Getty Center was the first building in the U.S. to achieve silver-level LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environment Design) certified status from the U.S. Green Building Council, which is one of the highest certifications of energy efficiency a building can receive.

The Getty Center's sustainability efforts have resulted in a 33 percent reduction of irrigation water and a 10 percent reduction in energy since 2001, leading to a total savings of $500,000 per year. The complex recycles half of its total waste every year, and engages in several other activities to remain as energy efficient as possible – including renting a herd of goats every spring to do their landscaping / help clear brush and reduce fire damage on the hillside.

All in all, the Getty Center is a beautiful and fascinating building. It takes a lot (seriously, a lot) for a museum to draw my attention away from the collection inside, but wandering through the Getty's grounds (and its Robert Irwin-designed garden) was just as enriching and satisfying an experience as the enjoyment I had when I (finally) ducked inside to roam their art-filled galleries.

Dear SFMOMA,

I have waited for years to visit your institution. I've loved it from afar ever since I was responsible for posting art-related baseball smack talk in the infamous #MuseumRangers vs. #MuseumGiants Twitter showdown, as the social media coordinator behind one of the Dallas-Fort Worth museums supporting the Texas Rangers in the 2010 World Series against the San Francisco Giants.

This, I said to myself at the time, is what museum engagement should be. 

I postponed making a trip to San Francisco until your new building was finished, and in the meantime, I watched your institution evolve through your assorted social media accounts. What you were able to do with your "On the Go" initiative, educating your fans online about your work and your collection, all without an actual building to showcase it in, was seriously impressive. 

The hype was real. The excitement was high. And I was in San Francisco less than 24 hours before I was in your galleries.

I am overjoyed to say that all the patience and waiting was more than worth it. SFMoMA, you are everything I hoped you would be, and more. 

Your collection – which is outstanding, in every sense of the word – is beautifully installed. It fits every nook and cranny of its new home like a hand inside a glove, like the collection and the building were made for each other (which I assume was the case.) There are no jarring transitions between artists or periods, no space that isn't being used to its best potential – everything flows seamlessly from one gallery to the next, everything carefully presented in the context of the works before it. 

The amount of wall text in your galleries is informative without being overbearing. Some works are given more space to breathe, to contemplate in and of themselves, while other works are purposefully and deliberately installed closer together for easy compare/contrast, each bringing out the best in the others.

The effect is subtle, it's well executed, and your curatorial staff deserves a high-five for how well they pulled it off.

Also, SFMoMA – all the things you're doing to attract the diversity in age, genders, nationalities, races and sexual orientations that I saw in your galleries today, both among your patrons and represented on your walls – is nothing short of extraordinary.

It is safe to say that I've never seen so many young people happily crowded into a modern art museum at 7:30 on a Thursday night, just to look at and learn about the art. It is genuinely exciting and inspiring to see. You've made museums cool again, for all ages, and there is literally something for everybody in all of your vast offerings.

Taken together, all that you've done and continue to do warms my little museum-nerd heart, and for that, I'm filled with gratitude.

I've been to a lot of museums – A LOT of museums – and SFMoMA, you hands down, unequivocally take the cake.

You should be incredibly proud of everything you've accomplished as an institution, because even after (finally) visiting in person, my assessment from all those years ago still holds true: 

You're absolutely everything that a museum should be.

Consider this letter the virtual equivalent of me giving your organization a giant hug. Thank you guys for being so damn awesome, and keep up the good work. I can't wait to see what you're going to do next.

Love,
Andrea

Yet there was one aspect of the movie that my 8-year old self refused to accept. A serious injustice had been committed because – as I was constantly telling my parents for the next three weeks – "Those dinosaurs weren't velociraptors! They were deinonychus!"

And while further advances in paleontology have proven that I wasn't exactly right, my assessment wasn't exactly wrong either.

WHAT IS A VELOCIRAPTOR?

Velociraptors are part of a family of dinosaurs called Dromaeosauridae. This family shares a few common characteristics:

• All Dromaeosauridae are theropods – carnivorous dinosaurs that walked around on two legs (instead of four). Tyrannosaurs are also theropods.
• All Dromaeosauridae had a large, sickle-shaped claw on the second toe of each foot. This claw could be retracted off the ground when walking, and paleontologists think it could have been used as a slashing or stabbing weapon. It might even have been used to help raptors climb things, from trees to larger prey animals.
• Dromaeosauridae had large pubic bones similar to that of modern birds, which project outward beneath the base of their tails. The tails themselves were long and thin, and are thought to have provided a stabilizing counterweight while the animal was jumping or chasing down prey.
• Dromaeosauridae also had feathers...but that's another blog post.

So if Velociraptor and all of these other dinosaurs are in the same family, there can't be THAT many significant differences between them...right?

Well, for starters, actual Velociraptors measured about 6 feet long and 1.5 feet tall – about the height of a modern chicken – so that's a fairly significant difference between real life and movie Velociraptors. Deinonychus, by comparison, was about 11 feet long and 5 feet tall – still a bit smallish, but more true-to-size to the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.

Side note: Can you imagine if the raptors in the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies were chicken-sized? They'd lose so much of their bad-ass awesomeness...and apparently Stephen Spielberg agreed.

SO DID THE DINOSAUR IN JURASSIC PARK REALLY EXIST?

The short answer is yes – the fossil record just hadn't officially caught up with the movie yet.

A little over a year before Jurassic Park began filming in 1992, Dr. James Kirkland and his team unearthed something large in a Utah quarry – a sickle-shaped foot claw almost 9 inches long that belonged to a giant raptor, easily twice the size of any other animal in the family and up to eight times heavier than a Deinonychus. They called it Utahraptor.

Dr. Robert Bakker, current curator at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (and my personal Favorite Paleontologist of All Time), served as a consultant to Spielberg's special effects crew on Jurassic Park. In 1993, he recalled the anxiety felt by the movie's special effects artists over creating "a raptor species of a size that had never been documented by a real fossil," and the connection he made to Dr. Kirkland's discovery of Utahraptor:

"The artists were up to date in their raptor knowledge," Bakker wrote. "They knew that deinonychs were the largest, and that no raptor was bulkier than the average adult male human. Just before Jim [Kirkland] called [with the news of his new claw fossil], I'd listened to one artist complain that Spielberg had invented a raptor that didn't exist. Apparently, Spielberg wasn't happy with the small size of 'real' raptors – he wanted something bigger for his movie. He wanted a raptor twice as big as Deinonychus."

Kirkland and his team soon unearthed hand bones, foot bones, backbone and shinbones of their new specimen. They slowly pieced together a beast that stood over 6 feet tall and 23 feet long.

And with that discovery, one of Hollywood's favorite fictional dinosaurs found an approximate, real-life counterpart in the fossil record shortly after it had already been brought to life on the big screen.

But what about the word "love" as a work of art?

While I was running around Philadelphia during my very first Museumpalooza (ah, memories!), I stumbled upon this elevated sculpture by Robert Indiana in John F. Kennedy Plaza, now known affectionately as "Love Park". You may have seen similar sculptures in other large U.S. cities, like New York or Indianapolis, but at the time, I really didn't know much about it.

Begging the question...what is LOVE?

LOVE IS...A CHRISTMAS CARD.

Turns out, Robert Indiana's most famous work of art didn't start out as a celebration of Valentine's Day – it celebrated a holiday that took place a few months earlier.

LOVE actually started out as a Christmas card, specially commissioned by MoMA in 1965. It would go on to become the most popular Christmas card that the museum had ever issued.

The design had a variety of personal influences for Indiana. Growing up in the Christian Science Church, he wasn't exposed to much traditional religious iconography – no crosses, crucifixes, or saints. Instead, the message of the Christian Science Church was simple: love.

And as for the colors? Indiana was encouraged in his artistic pursuits by his father, who worked for the Phillips 66 gasoline company. Although his father passed away in 1965, while Indiana was working on this piece, the artist fondly remembered seeing the red and green Phillips 66 sign as a kid, contrasted against the blue sky. Thus, the color palette for the original piece was born.

LOVE IS...A MOVEMENT.

Once it was created, Indiana's LOVE quickly became assimilated into pop culture. After all, the counterculture movement was at its peak by the mid-1960s; "free love" and social revolution was in the air.

There was also plenty of violence in the world and much to rebel against – the loss of American lives during the Vietnam War, police brutality against homosexuals during the Stonewall Riots, violence against people of color during the Birmingham Riot and subsequent battles for Civil Rights, and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy.

So it made sense that Indiana's LOVE became popular. As art historian John Wilmerding notes, "It has power both for its graphics and for its meaning. You can see it against the background of the Cold War as if it were a wish for peace, a wish for brotherly love, easily associated with a pervasive American phenomenon going back to the Kennedys."

LOVE IS...PROBLEMATIC.

The popularity of the LOVE design soon began causing its own set of issues, mostly surrounding copyright. Prior to 1978, U.S. copyright law stated that in order for a creation to be protected, an artist had to either register it or put a copyright notice on it.

Indiana failed to copyright his LOVE design at the time, so this meant that there was little he could do to stop the many unauthorized uses and knock-offs of his art – not to mention the amount of royalties he missed out on. Of particular note is the popular LOVE postage stamp, issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 1973 – over 300 million stamps were printed, and Indiana only received a one-time flat fee of $1,000.

Once a new copyright law went into effect in 1978, it no longer became necessary for an artist to place a copyright notice on his work to receive royalties from its use. Since then, Indiana has been able to reclaim his rights to his LOVE design. 

LOVE IS...UNIVERSAL.

By 1977, Indiana started translating his LOVE design into other languages. His first translation, AHAVA (1977) means "love" in Hebrew. After being exhibited in Central Park, the piece was gifted to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Due to the positions of the letters, the piece takes on new meaning when written in Hebrew, explains Mira Lapidot, the Chief Curator of Fine Arts at the Israel Museum:

"If you cross it horizontally, you have the word "love" like you have it in English. But vertically, it could also be read as two different Hebrew words. You have 'av', which is the Hebrew word for father; then you have the double 'hay', which is an acronym or a symbol for God. So suddenly you have 'God the father,' which is interesting because it goes back to why Indiana began his engagement with the LOVE logo – 'God is love' from the Christian Science Church."

Another example of Indiana's translated LOVE designs is AMOR (1998) – which means "love" in both Spanish and Latin. This particular sculpture spent a year on the east terrace of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it served as a backdrop for the 2015 World Meeting of Families and a public mass led by Pope Francis during his papal visit to the city.

The sculpture has since moved down the street, and can now be found in Sister Cities Park...still looking right at home in the City of Brotherly Love.

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran an article that was provocatively titled, "Is the Met Museum 'a Great Institution in Decline'?" And to be honest, after the 2016 that the Met had, it was probably a fair question.

Between the reveal of the museum's $40 million deficit that forced the buyout or layoff of nearly 100 employees, the hefty price tag of its expansion into the Whitney's old building (now known as Met Breuer), its botched plans for its David Chipperfield expansion, and its publicly-ridiculed yet very expensive rebranding project...after all of that, the Met could have probably used an institution-wide hug.

It's worth pointing out that the Met's financial struggles are not an isolated incident among New York's big museums. MoMA also offered voluntary buyouts to its staff members during 2016, and the Brooklyn Museum did the same in order to off-set a $3 million deficit.

The important thing now, at least where the Met is concerned, is figuring out how museum leadership plans to identify the larger problem (i.e. "who or what to blame") and how to fix it.

WHO OR WHAT *NOT* TO BLAME

While the article points out that there are plenty of people on the museum staff who are willing to anonymously play armchair quarterback to Thomas Campbell, the director of the Met for almost ten years, these same internal critics also describe a "pervasive sense that institutional memory is going out the door and [a] fear that the Met’s mission to educate through scholarship has been overshadowed by its desire to attract millennials through social media."

To which I personally say: That assertion is some serious...

Look, while I am a fan of Thomas Campbell, I'm not saying that his financial overreach was good. Yes, he could have probably paced himself and the institution's checkbook a little bit better. But I still don't think the scope of his vision is wrong.

The main problem that I see is that the Met's anonymous "internal critics" think that educating through scholarship and attracting Millennials through social media are mutually exclusive things.

But they aren't. At all.

A MODEST PROPOSAL

There is an unfortunate strain of snobbery among some museum and academic scholars who consider new media to be nothing more than a marketing gimmick. They don't take it seriously, they feel that it contributes to the "dumbing down" of high-minded art criticism, and they consider it a minor distraction in the institution's overall quest to push the envelope of artistic or scientific knowledge.

Their marketing teams, on the other hand, recognize social media for what it is: a way to interact with museum patrons outside of the institution, a way to spread new knowledge and information about museum collections in an easy-to-digest format, and a way to attract a new generation whose monetary donations will be paying the organization's electric bills over the next several decades. 

This is not a rant against researchers or scholarship at all, because knowledge is important – museums, by their very existence, are founded on it. And lord knows, "millennial engagement" can often feel like chasing after one shiny new iPhone app after another.

This rant is against a misplaced sense of academic snobbery, because the reality is that museum scholarship and social media can – and should – play together in the same sandbox, so long as they respect each others' strengths and weaknesses and treat each other like equals.

Whether the anonymous internal critics at the Met realize it or not, the next generation of donors is going to become increasingly difficult for organizations to reach outside of social media as audiences become more and more niche-based, retreating into their respective content bubbles. Therefore, it might behoove them to become fluent in the medium.

Likewise, social media doesn't really provide the chance for organizations to dig deep into specific objects or ideas – literally, the entire point of museums – which is why solid, well-researched scholarship is so important once visitors wander into the galleries.

The Met is a great institution that's still got a lot going for it – its vast permanent collection and frequent exhibitions are stronger than ever, and its attendance has increased to about seven million people a year. Perhaps if Mr. Campbell would focus on healing this particular divide in his institution, it would not only go a long way towards uniting and balancing his organization's interests...it might also set a national example for other museums to follow during the next several years.

“You have been to the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, yes?” inquired my grandmother’s friend, in a heavy accent that I couldn’t quite place.

I assured her that I had. It was one of my personal favorite museums, and I visited every chance that I got.

“It’s a fine museum,” agreed my grandmother’s friend. “But I regret that I cannot visit it. Because of the painting.”

Confused, I asked for more details about the painting in question. After hearing her describe it further, I realized the work that my grandmother’s friend was referring to was Aschenblume (1983-97), an extremely large work by German artist Anselm Kiefer. The painting usually hangs in the first of the Modern’s permanent collection galleries and depicts the Chancellery of the Third Reich in Berlin. Kiefer overlaid much of the piece with a mixture of paint, cement, dirt, clay, ash, and a single large, dried sunflower. 

How is it possible, I asked this woman, that this single painting could keep you from visiting an entire museum?

“I was a young girl, perhaps six or seven years old, when the bombing began in Vienna, near my home,” she explained quietly. “My sister and I…it was weeks before we left Austria for America…we were in the tunnels, and we were buried for a while by the rubble. And when I saw that painting, as soon as I walked into the room, it all came back to me – the sounds, the smells, the soot and the ash in the air – and I simply could not go on."

"I cannot visit that museum again while that painting hangs in the gallery. It is just...too much.”

I was speechless by the time she finished her story. At this point, I had walked by Aschenblume countless times during my many visits to the Modern. I had always been struck by its scale, and I knew the work’s backstory – that this painting was one of Kiefer's attempts to come to terms with his national identity as a German in a world still reeling from the fallout of WWII. I also knew that Aschenblume, with its delicate, upside down sunflower, was also representative of transformation, of new life and new beginnings rising from the ashes.

These facts and the artist's intent were all things that I knew – I'd read about them, I'd studied them in classes. But I'd never really gotten it – never truly understood the impact, nor recognized the emotional turmoil that would have driven Kiefer to create this monumental work.

And honestly, until that moment, I don’t think I’d ever really appreciated how a work of art could provoke such a visceral, overwhelmingly powerful effect on someone.

The experience of talking to my grandmother’s friend that day caused a profound shift in my thinking about art. I realized that in order to truly know a work of art, to intimately appreciate it and understand it, you can’t just stick to textbooks and art theory.

Art has to be connected to people, to ideas, to emotions and philosophies and culture, while leaving some room for different perspectives and interpretations made by others. Art needs to be connected to history, both past and present, so viewers can learn from it and prepare for the future. Art should be explored through questions, examining all sides of an issue – the light and the dark, the good and the bad – while often acknowledging that there may be more than one answer, and that the piece itself asks questions too.

Most importantly, this experience taught me that each of us experiences art in a way that directly reflects our own life experience...and that there is no "right" or "wrong" way of interacting with it.