You really, really, really want to go see the Carsten Höller exhibition that is opening at the New Museum this Wednesday. We got a sneak peak of the installation and it's bonkers-cakes! Obviously you will want to start on the fourth floor so you can take the chute down through the concrete floor. Also there are like some lights and a bunch of birds (looks like a mobile of bird cages with birds in them) and stuff. (Stuff = "a sensory deprivation pool." Just what the senseless Lower East Side needed.) It's max ridic, as the kids say. HOW MANY HIPSTERS DOES IT TAKE TO JAM UP A SLIDE? Let's find out together.

At MoMA, the amount of revenue from admissions (almost $25 million a year, and these are all 2010 fiscal year numbers) is quite nearly equal to the amount approved by the board for yearly spending from their investments. (The museum overall has investments valued at $642 million. You know: 2/3rds of a billion dollars.) READ MORE

In 1628, the Vasa Warship set off on its maiden voyage in Stockholm harbor, aiming towards Poland. Made from the hull of over 100 oak trees, it was outfitted with 64 cannons and had masts over 160 feet high. After traveling 1,300 meters—less than a nautical mile—the ship met a strong breeze, foundered and sank. The Vasa was, in every way, a failure. So of course it has, since 1990, had its own museum, where visitors to Stockholm can go to see what a gargantuan example of 1600s-style hubris looks like. Salvaged from the sea floor in the early '60s, the ship stands at the center of the museum, largely intact, with 95% of its original wood. It's a scientific marvel. An archeological wonder. Truly a treasure and record of a forgotten time.
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Ooh, the Alexander McQueen show at the Met is now opening earlier for members and staying open later for the general public in the first week in August. Warning: the show allegedly closes August 7! That's soon! (Pro tip: go EARLY. The lines are bonkers.)

“Leave it as at is,” Theodore Roosevelt once said about the wonders of the Precambrian: “The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.” READ MORE

I know you were busily reading the newspaper cover to cover this weekend, so you won't have missed the exceedingly important piece by Nicolai Ouroussoff on the Barnes Foundation, the Getty and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: three museums built in America by wackos that have since (after their founders' deaths, of course) been taken astray of their intentions by their current managers. The Barnes (which has on exhibit more Cezannes than you can see in all of France, should that be a thing you would ever want) is currently in the last gasps of a long legal fight, which seems to be ending badly for the people who would like it not to be uprooted and moved to downtown Philadelphia. Everything interesting becomes made dull for profit! Attend the Barnes before June 30th, if you can! And then, join me in never visiting it again.

The Laurel Nakadate show opens at PS1 this weekend, and I have never "loved" her but when I think about her work, I think maybe she is the artist of our time in many ways? (Or maybe Andrea Fraser is, given that her piece ''Untitled," from 2003, was documentation of her having sex with a collector who paid $20,000 for it. ("It" being the piece and the sex; same thing.) Because, what else is there to say?) Nakadate, slightly later, embarked on a great video series where she documented going home with strangers. Anyway, this should be seen! (There's tons of stuff on her website to get a taste.)

The 600-year-old skull of the famed German pirate Klaus Störtebeker, has disappeared from Hamburg's history museum. It's a valuable item. The guy was a total rockstar. READ MORE