Twee Grows in Tribeca

March 24, 2015 Arts & Culture

I was working up a rant about “Close at Hand,” the new recurring item in the New York Times food section that focuses on a famous-ish person’s favorite kitchen tool—because it’s lazy, news-free lifestyle coverage—until I noticed that there is indeed some news buried in this week’s installment.

Mmuseumm, the precious collection of semi-precious artifacts in an old freight elevator shaft at 4 Cortlandt Alley, is opening Mmuseumm 2 nearby. (What, not Twoseum? Moreseum? Mu2eum?) The Times says it’s “three doors down” from the original, while Mmuseumm’s website says it’s “next door” (which would place it inside K&M Camera). I emailed Mmuseumm to ask which of the spaces above it is. “Mmuseumm 2 is one of those,” was the reply. “And we are excited to surprise you as to which one it is.”

The first installation, opening April 10, recreates the closet of Sara Berman, the late mother of writer/artist Maira Kalman and grandmother of Alex Kalman, Mmuseumm’s director. From the Times: “The installation is ‘a celebration of how people create order,’ Ms. Kalman said. The Sawa 2000″—Maira Kalman’s favorite kitchen tool—”is a discreet gleam among her mother’s meticulous stacks of camisoles and sheets.”

 
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3 Comments

  1. David G. Imber
    March 26, 2015 • 1:21 pm

    Admittedly, my defense of Mmuseumm is personal and familial, but isn’t the word “twee” a bit harsh here? I suppose it’s in the eyes of the beholder…

    Reply
    • Erik Torkells
      March 26, 2015 • 1:25 pm

      From the Atlantic:

      “Is Twee the right word for it, for the strangely persistent modern sensibility that fructifies in the props departments of Wes Anderson movies, tapers into the waxed mustache-ends of young Brooklynites on bicycles, and detonates in a yeasty whiff every time someone pops open a microbrewed beer? Well, it is now. An across-the-board examination of this thing is long overdue, and the former Spin writer Marc Spitz is to be congratulated on having risen to the challenge. With Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film, he’s given it a name, and he’s given it a canon. (The canon is crucial, as we shall see.) And if his book is a little all over the place—well, so is Twee. Spitz hails it as “the most powerful youth movement since Punk and Hip-Hop.” He doesn’t even put an arguably in there, bless him. You’re Twee if you like artisanal hot sauce. You’re Twee if you hate bullies. Indeed, it’s Spitz’s contention that we’re all a bit Twee: the culture has turned. Twee’s core values include “a healthy suspicion of adulthood”; “a steadfast focus on our essential goodness”; “the cultivation of a passion project” (T-shirt company, organic food truck); and “the utter dispensing with of ‘cool’ as it’s conventionally known, often in favor of a kind of fetishization of the nerd, the geek, the dork, the virgin.”

      http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/07/the-twee-revolution/372273/

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