Jaunted

Miami Travel / Festivals / Culture / Cultural Travel / Dance / Drama / Art / → All Tags

As the Clocks Go Back This Weekend, Miami Will Party for 13 Hours

Staying up all night in Miami is not novel, but this weekend's Sleepless Night Miami Beach means you can do more than just hit the clubs and eat dodgy pizza between midnight and 6 a.m.

The insomniac's dream cultural festival kicks off at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday November 5 and runs through the next morning, culminating in a beachfront sunrise breakfast from Whole Foods.

The event was held in 2007 and 2009 but this year Sleepless Night coincides with the weekend when we turn our clocks back—meaning you can party for one sneaky additional hour.

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Sex Travel / London Travel / Art Travel / Art / Museum Travel / Events / → All Tags

Art or Porn? Takashi Murakami's Divisive Exhibit Hits London's Gagosian Gallery

To the general populous, the name Takashi Murakami may sound only vaguely familiar, likely because of his well-known collaboration with luxury label Louis Vuitton during the early 2000s. The popularity of the Eye-Love bag has since faded from memory, another blink-and-you'll-miss-it trend massively, momentarily hawked by the fashion industry and discarded once a flood of cheap knockoffs hit the market.

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Travel Snapshots / Airports / DTW / Art / Graffiti Travel / → All Tags

Graffiti Rocks are a Hidden Attraction at Detroit's Metro Airport

On your next trip through Detroit’s Metro Airport you might want to take a couple minutes to leave your mark for future passengers. There’s always the option of ruining the bathroom stall with a little bit of graffiti, but frequent flyers and families have found a better place to leave their mark within the McNamara Terminal.

If you’re connecting through the airport thanks to the comfort of a regional jet—you might be somewhere within Concourse B. Even if you’re not, make your way to the end of the hall towards Gate 21, and you’ll stumble upon a few potted trees trying their best to get a little sunlight. Look down towards their trunks and you’ll find this awesome collection of graffiti rocks.

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Musuems / Art Galleries / Art / Amsterdam Travel / → All Tags

The Hermitage Amsterdam Looks Pretty But Needs a Better Opening Exhibit

You know how when someone tells you they’re going to Amsterdam you give them a knowing look and think “I know what you’ll be up to, you dissolute human being”? Well you’d better stop doing that because this summer the 'Dam is all about the culture.

The Stedelijk Museum is running a mobile exhibition round town while it’s under refurbishment, the Royal Palace in Dam Square has just reopened, and on June 20, the Hermitage Museum of St Petersburg, no less, opened up a branch in a 17th-century building that used to be an old folks’ home.

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Street Art / Street Art Travel / Art / Crime / Vandalism / Banksy / Art Travel / → All Tags

Look Out Banksy: Barrel Monster Man Faces Prison for Raleigh Road Art

It didn't last long, but commuters in Raleigh, North Carolina were treated to a whimsical display of street art recently, as a 22-year-old NC State student (allegedly) assembled a barrel monster out of bright orange traffic barrels and put it to work directing traffic on a busy public street. Police say Joseph Carnevale is being charged with larceny for stealing and damaging the traffic barrels on May 31 for the purpose of building a statue, and I guess they're right, but it always seems unfair when it's vandalism you actually like.

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Amsterdam Travel / Art Galleries / Art / Netherlands / Amsterdam / → All Tags

Russian Art Branches Out To Amsterdam

Who says the Russians aren't good at sharing? A little to our surprise, the Hermitage Amsterdam is opening next month in a new art gallery in an old seventeenth century building which is basically a branch of the famous and original Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia. They've been running minor exhibits in another building for a few years, but now the real Hermitage Amsterdam is ready to thrill.

We've had a couple of trips to the Russian version and always been dazzled by the suggestions it would take a lifetime to view every piece of art there – and only if they rotated their display in time with your visits. The opening of the Amsterdam branch means there's another place for the Hermitage to exhibit some of their vast number of art treasures, and we're excited about that.

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Museums / Free WiFi / Los Angeles Travel / Culture / Art / → All Tags

Why the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art is Worth a Visit

We kind of alluded to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last week in that story about Pasadena art museums, but it really deserves its own post.

The museum is the largest encyclopedic museum west of Chicago, with over 250,000 works of art - and from every inhabited continent - spread over an ever-growing maze of buildings and pavilions. Plus it's one of those LA destinations that's actually accessible by Metro. Plus they have free WiFi. So off we go.

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Museums / Art / Pasadena Travel / Culture / → All Tags

Escape the Botox in LA for Degas in Pasadena

It has come to our attention that Angelinos have a reputation for being a touch on the vacuous side. It has even suggested that we here at Jaunted have had something to do with having creating that impression. This obviously will not do.

If you aren't coming to Los Angeles for any Fast and Furious tours, may we suggest something a little more (ok, a lot more) enriching?

First of all there's the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which we've posted about before and will probably expand on soon enough. In the meantime nearby Pasadena- basically an LA suburb, though don't tell them that - has two of the world's most spectacular art museums.

Both are a mixture of gardens and galleries, displaying exquisite masterpieces against carefully cultivated bucolic backdrops. And since Pasadena is kind of close to LA that's just like having high art in the city itself! Right?

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Street Art / Aakash Nihalani / Poster Boy / Ellis G / Brooklyn / New York City Travel / Art / → All Tags

Neo Con New York Opening in Brooklyn

This weekend, New York City street art takes center stage at the 17 Frost Gallery in Williamsburg. The Neo-Con Collective, made up of renown street artists Aakash Nihalani, Ellis G., and Poster Boy, has created an exhibition of collaborative installations for the gallery that will open Saturday.

17 Forest has praised the artists for their innovative and thought provoking work.

The collective consists of artists that utilize ephemeral mediums to create public art, focusing on neo-contextualizing the mundane. Their works, on and off the street, possess urgent relevance to modern societal contradictions and conflagrations, confronting the humanness of discomfort and dissatisfaction with typical, routine, existence.

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Flight Paths / Flight Tracking / Art / Aaron Koblin / FAA / Wired / Geek Travel / → All Tags

Aaron Koblin's Haunting Flight Paths Project

This is a screencap from an interactive Google Map created by artist Aaron Koblin, representing the 205,000 aircrafts the FAA tracked on August 12, 2008. In this case, we've filtered the air traffic by model, so each color represents a different one of the 573 aircrafts that flew that day. The flight paths are darker as the planes maintain their altitude and brighter the closer they are to the ground.

The work emerges as part of a collaboration between Koblin, Wired, and flight tracker FlightView. Koblin took images from his larger Flight Paths project and layered them, creating the interactive map.

You can go to the main project page and play around with the real version. You can choose your own filters, zooming in and out of your favorite city, and even look at the paths of specific aircraft.

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Religious Travel / Art / NASA / Outer Space / → All Tags

Jesuits' Cosmos: Austrian Artists Install Massive NASA Mural in Vienna Church

Outer space is the perfect metaphor for God and the mysteries of life. It's infinitely vast, it's mysteriously unknowable, and it elicits wonder and contemplation in all who behold it. This might be why Austrian artists Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf installed a massive NASA photograph of an astronaut floating in space on the ceiling of the historic Jesuit Church in Vienna in an exhibit entitled The Jesuits' Cosmos. The photo, which will be on display through May 25, 2009, is printed on a huge section of semi-transparent net fabric. Employing a change in lighting, the curators can switch the focus between the astronaut and the curvature of the blue planet to a "reverted view" of the Andrea Pozzo ceiling frescoes above them. Either way, the viewer is awed with a sense of spatial illusion. I like this trend of installing thought-provoking pieces of modern art in houses of worship. It's a pleasant reminder that we're all on the same planet, just trying to get along and figure a few things out.

[Photo: Steinbrener-Dempf]

Related Stories:
· Jesuits' Cosmos [Steinbrener-Dempf]
· Vienna Jesuit Church [Official Site]
· Religious Travel Coverage [Jaunted]

Botanical Gardens / Phoenix Travel / Art / → All Tags

Art and Nature Collide at Phoenix's Desert Botanical Garden

We know, we know...you’re thinking, “Phoenix's Desert Botanical Garden? Is there anything to see besides cactus…lots and lots of cactus?” Apparently there is now through May 31, 2009, since glass artist Dale Chihuly’s fanciful exhibit, “The Nature of Glass,” will be on display at the PBG, which is usually known for...well, just for its wide variety of agave and palo verde trees.

But for now, there are 17 separate sculptures and installations, including The Sun, which towers over the entrance at 16 feet tall and 14 feet wide, and chandeliers in the Cactus and Succulent Galleries—that just sounds naughty, doesn’t it?

After training at the Venini glass factory in Venice (where else?), Dale Chihuly has been creating these fantastical glass works since 1965 at his Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State.

What makes the monumental scale and vibrancy of his works even more impressive is the fact that Chihuly himself is blind in one eye—that’s right, the eye patch he wears isn’t just for dramatic effect.

Advanced reservations are required as the garden is doing timed admissions. Members get free admission while the rest of us have to pay $15. Seniors get in for $13.50 and students get in for $7.50. Children 3-12 still have to pay too at $5 a pop.

Related Stories:
· Chihuly Exhibit [Desert Botanical Garden]

[Photo: Adam Rodriguez/PBG]

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