go big or go home.

TOP MFA SCHOOLS
if i'm going to grad school(which I wasn't planning on) I'm going for the name:

1	Rhode Island School of Design Providence, RI			Enter your zip	4.6
2	Yale University New Haven, CT			Enter your zip	4.5
3	School of the Art Institute of Chicago Chicago, IL			Enter your zip	4.4
4	Cranbrook Academy of Art Bloomfield Hills, MI			Enter your zip	4.2
4	Maryland Institute College of Art Baltimore, MD			Enter your zip	4.2

So if these are the top five schools, supposing I could get into one of these programs, I would go to one of them and get a lot more in debt.

TAKASHI MURAKAMI @ the gagosian

I liked the chapter about Murakami in Seven Days in the Art World, but I had only seen his more commercial stuff beforehand, such as the Kanye West album cover. I was excited to have the opportunity to see his work in person after reading about his past work. The piece was extremely large taking over nearly a whole wall in the gallery. Its seems that his style has changed dramatically since that article was written, while style keeping with his themes. The work described in the book and the work of his that I had looked at online was unrealistically clean and solid colors which often created a flat surface. I was also happy to see a departure from the hyper sexuality he used in his sculptures simply as a matter of personal taste.

The painting was heavily layered with many competing textures overlapped by dripping paint. The painting was so impressive. It just engulfed you and had so many details and areas of interest. I could've looked at it for an hour. I am also glad to have seen it in person, because the minute details and the vast size would be hard to imagine in a reproduction. I like the mountain of tiny skulls(also a matter of personal taste) and the composite cheshire cat type of animal sitting at top. I was not at all disappointed, but to be honest I had almost expected to see a larger quantity of work (not that I wish there was, because the one was enough) after reading about his assembly line and his work ethic.

ROBERT FRANK @ the met

I'm a fan of Robert Frank's work which is what led me to see his exhibit at the Met. I've seen The Americans in book form, so it was strange and interesting to see them presented on the wall in that manner. The way they were set up, wrapping around the walls of several different rooms led you on a journey that was quite different from its book form. It was almost maze like and many people around me just chose to look at them out of order. But thats the thing about a gallery versus book format-- you don't have as much control of direction. The images are captivating and mundane at the same time, one of those "anywhere U.S.A." type of scenarios, but I had already seen that in the book.
What I found most interesting were the photographs that Frank decided to eliminate from the book. There was a whole wall of printed photographs and centerpieces of contact sheets. It shows the volume of work that the artist produced and what his elimination process was. For instance most of the photographs showed the subjects looking at something distant and unseen-- not at the camera. I noticed that some of the photos were of the same subjects making eye contact with the photographer. These are just interesting questions to think about, especially in terms of what to show in your own work. I mean, I'm not a photographer, but I feel that every artist must at some point narrow their scope of what they want to portray, what they like and the references they use. So, that part was beneficial to me.