September Favorites

As days get shorter and the weather gets colder, September is the ideal month to brush up on your knowledge of art history and return to your favorite museums after a long summer break. In Vienna, many new and exciting exhibitions are set to open in the course of the fall, including the Albertina's Edvard Munch (Sept. 25 - Jan. 24) and World of Romanticism (Nov. 13 - Feb. 21), the Belvedere's Rembrandt - Tizian - Bellotto  (June 11 - Nov. 8), the Leopold Museum's A Rush of Color (Oct. 9 - Jan. 11), and the MUMOK's Prosperous Poison: On the Feminist Appropriation of the Austrian Unconscious (Sept. 10 - April 24). 

Your city's art offer is more restricted? It's already too cold to venture outside for a quick stroll to the next museum? Luckily, you do not even have to leave your house (or your couch, for that matter) to enjoy the fine arts. Here's a list of entertaining, thought-provoking, funny, and worthwhile virtual offers to satisfy your artistic cravings. 

Screenshot from the Google Art Project.

Online art galleries are a great way to view artworks on your laptop or smartphone screen. Many offer high resolution images of some of the most famous works in art history, allowing you to zoom in on details that would be impossible to discern with the naked eye in a crowded museum. The most popular free online gallery is probably the Google Art Project, with millions of artworks from all periods and eras. The platform allows you to create your personal gallery by choosing paintings, comparing them side by side, and read up on or listen to their art historical context. For contemporary art lovers, Eyestorm is a great resource for not only perusing and enjoying, but perhaps buying and hence supporting budding artists' works. Finally, many museums, such as the Guggenheim and the Getty Museum, put their art books and catalogues online for free. An overview can be found at openculture.com.

The feature-length documentary Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, detailing the performance artist's retrospective at the MOMA in New York City, is now available on Netflix for your viewing pleasure. 

The film not only provides an intimate behind-the-scenes look into all the collaborative effort that goes into mounting such a major exhibition, but also documents Abramovic's unparalleled emotional stamina and will power for enduring the most demanding piece of her career yet: For three months straight, she sat in a chair in the museum's atrium, inviting the audience to join her, one at a time, by taking a seat on the opposite end of the table and looking straight at her face. If this sounds rather boring or even indeed irrelevant to you ("How is that even art?!"), make sure to watch the documentary and let yourself be taken in by the spell that Abramovic casts on everyone in her presence.

Finally, some humor to round off your artsy September: If you appreciate art just as much as you love feminism, you're gonna love The Toast's series of historical paintings set with contemporary captions. I especially recommend the cycles women ignoring men as art and men starting unnecessary conversations in art. Who said that Western art history has to be serious and male-dominated? 

For obvious reasons, I'm particularly obsessed with memes of Judith and Holofernes...

Do you more tips for enjoying art online? Let me know in the comments below!