In a continuing effort to include the middle of the country in my announcements (I tend to get too California/New York-centric), I wanted to let you know about an exhibition at the Wexner* Center for the Arts (at Ohio State University).  I love the simplicity of the concept and the name:  Shiny .  Here’s a more thorough description from the Wex:

"Delivers pure flash."–COLUMBUS DISPATCH

This bright, playful exhibition examines our culture’s love of luxury, spectacle, shiny things, and our own reflections. Many of the works in Shiny play with the commodity status of art, both embracing and slyly critiquing conspicuous display. You’ll watch Andy Warhol’s helium-filled Silver Clouds floating sensuously on air currents and see yourself and the Wexner Center’s architecture reflected in the shimmering surfaces of Jeff Koons’s 10-foot-tall Balloon Dog. Other artists in the exhibition are Rachel Harrison, Jim Hodges, Louise Lawler, former Wexner Center Residency Award recipient Josiah McElheny, Michael Minelli, Mai-Thu Perret, and Kelley Walker. Most of their works were created in the last five years, and Minelli, a sculptor based in Los Angeles, exhibits a new piece commissioned by the Wexner Center specifically for the show.

Shiny is happening now through December 31. 

FYI, that is far from all that is going on at the Wexner.  There is a Frank Stella exhibit that sounds amazing – 20 canvases from 1958, "a seminal, experimental year for the young artist, then just out of college."

Finally, don’t miss Architecture Interruptis .  I’ll let Wexarts.org sum it up for you again, as I really cannot explain it any more clearly:

The Church of Saint Pierre, in Firminy, France, was designed by pivotal 20th-century architect Le Corbusier with a young associate, Jose Oubrerie, in the early 1960s. Now, after years of delays and interruptions, Oubrerie, a professor at Ohio State’s Knowlton School of Architecture, is bringing the project to fruition. The structure has become a true partnership between these two architects, and this exhibition invites you to examine the interaction of their ideas. Featuring historical and contemporary photographs, sketches, and drawings, and a newly commissioned model, the exhibition strives to bring the experience of the building to the Wexner Center galleries.

*DISCLAIMER:  The following is my lazy, unfact-checked, stream of consciousness bad memory trying to put some little irony together and failing miserably:

 
Wexner, Wexner – is that The Limited guy?  If so, he’s had quite an interesting role in sponsoring architecture.  Isn’t there some strange cul-de-sac-y subdivision outside of Columbus Ohio that he came up with that was supposed to emulate the Southern grandeur of the Richmond Virginia architecture by William Lawrence Bottomley?  Then it turned out Bottomley was a carpetbagger and not from the south at all so the whole thing was pretty strange.  Sorry, I’m too lazy to look it up but I could swear Richard Guy Wilson told some odd story about this Wexner guy in Architectural History class.  Or maybe he said it on "America’s Castles ," I can’t remember.  Then Wexner goes from faux capital of the Confederacy Georgian McMansions to sponsoring the first major public building  designed by Peter Eisenman , the kind of architect who puts a big gaping slash through a bed all the way down to the floor below.  Am I totally making this up?  Does anyone remember this stuff?  Do I even have the right Wexner?