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An Exhibition Worth Thousands of Words - The New York Times

posted onJuly 8, 2017
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Article snippet: One of the savviest, wisest, most revealing museum exhibitions of the summer may not have much actual art in it. But it circles the subject relentlessly like a satellite around a planet, wobbling in and out of art’s force field. We’re along for the ride, courtesy of a series of often riveting, mostly wordless visual dialogues between artists, conducted entirely by cellphone. In each of these dozen pictorial tête-à-têtes, two artists share images — scores, sometimes hundreds — and the occasional brief video. They tap moments of beauty or strangeness; of everyday life or travel; of buildings, streets and weather. We see flashes of wit, poetry and even genius and observe momentous events, both private and presidential. Everywhere puzzles are set in motion for us to contemplate and parse, making our own meaning. As museum shows go, “Talking Pictures: Camera-Phone Conversations Between Artists” was a relatively loose, even risky, proposition undertaken where you might least expect it: the august Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Fifth Avenue building, even). It was cooked up by Mia Fineman, associate curator of the Met’s photography department, who was intrigued by how the camera phone had transformed photography, giving it a diaristic, real-time intimacy and turning it, she says in a wall text, into “a fluid, instantaneous, ephemeral medium, closer to speaking than to writing.” Ms. Fineman wanted to examine the speechlike nature of cellphone photo-chat through a finer ... Link to the full article to read more

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