(Getty Images)

To mark the fact that the it is now open seven days a week, the Museum of Modern Art will offer free admission to the first 100 visitors who stop by on Tuesdays this month.

That's May 7, 14, 21 and 28, for you tragic cases who don't own calendars. Get there early, beat the Europeans!

A page of 'A Real Bronx Cheer' (2012). (Courtesy Fulton Ryder)

While the Museum of Modern Art has not publicized the names of the various poets participating in its "Transform the World! Poetry Must Be Made by All!" event on Saturday, Fulton Ryder just announced its own plans for the afternoon. Wander through the fourth-floor painting and sculpture galleries from 3 to 4 p.m. and you'll find Dan Colen in the Richard Serra room reading from his recent art book, A Real Bronx Cheer (2012). 

The book features photographs involving Whoopie cushions and drawings paired with bits of text. (First-edition copies are available on Fulton Ryder's website.) One spread pairs a picture of the classic pink cushion with: "You call this art!! How 'bout a nice picture of a bowl of fruit—jerk-off!"

Should make for an interesting reading.

Ms. Abramovic's exhibition, if you'll recall, involved her sitting in a chair in MoMA's atrium and staring silently at visitors who took a seat across from her. The film was a backstage glimpse at Ms. Abramovic and the organization of the show. It was also Mr. Akers's first film. Mazel!

'Barn Swallow, Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, July 9, 1974 (Hirundo rustica
erythrogaster)' (1974) by Eliot Porter. (Courtesy Museum of Modern Art)

“It actually makes me nervous to stand up to speak about it, because I still go and look at these things way too frequently,” the artist Trisha Donnelly said at the start of her talk at MoMA on Monday night. She was discussing the works in the show that she has organized for the “Artist’s Choice” series, which invites artists to curate from the museum’s collection. Her show, in galleries on the fourth and fifth floors, is on view for three more weeks.

As an artist, Ms. Donnelly throws curveballs. Most famously, she arrived at one of her crowded openings on horseback, reciting a mysterious speech. At MoMA on Monday, she asked for the lights to be turned off in the sold-out theater. She wanted to play some music that had influenced the show.

First up was a recording of 18th-century composer Domenico Scarlatti’s “Cat’s Fugue” on harpsichord that, she said, “somehow, I think, spatially builds and generates a dimension that’s somewhat inexplicable.” She could have been describing her richly enigmatic art, or her show, which is eclectic, historically and otherwise: there are paintings by Redon and Hartley, ionizers, a wheelchair, intricate drawings for microprocessors.

Next came a version of the “Cat’s Fugue” for the Moog synthesizer by 20th-century composer Wendy Carlos (of Tron and A Clockwork Orange fame). Ms. Donnelly asked the technician to turn it louder, and even louder, all with the lights out. She broached the topic of transubstantiation. “It’s maybe a dumb Catholic idea, but the possibility that it might have been a digital suggestion before the digital is kind of interesting,” she said. “It’s pretty radical and actually altogether human and repeated through many belief systems.”

And then, an interlude, as Ms. Donnelly paged through a PowerPoint show of a scrapbook by the American photographer Gertrude Käsebier, which is part of her exhibition. It’s filled with images of the modernist photographer Edward Steichen, looking dashing, sometimes holding a long, thin pipe. “Look at these photos!” she marveled. “They seem so defenseless or something ... This was like a love journal of unrequited experience.”

This slipped into talk of Eliot Porter, who, before his death in 1990, forged a singular style of bird photography, and whose work occupies an entire room in Ms. Donnelly’s show. To make his bewitching close-ups, Porter would spend weeks climbing trees, gaining the comfort of birds, and moving nests centimeter by centimeter to make them easier to photograph. Looking at the photos, she said that she thought about “the idea that one point of one bird becomes however many thousands of paths the bird has flown.”

She played an abstract John Whitney film from 1975 and discussed his conviction that a new art form would come to exist, the fact that transistors were used for 20 years for various uses before scientists discovered their potential in microprocessors, and the idea that the Chinese were buried with cosmetics and hunting devices, believing that they would be reanimated. “So, just like a dead being expecting that there will be a regeneration of flesh in the future, by some innovation or finding, [the microchip] plants itself almost as a future discovery,” she said.

An audience member noted that the audio guides for Ms. Donnelly’s show are a little unusual. They have the esteemed art historian Robert Rosenblum, who died in 2006, discussing MoMA’s 1989 Picasso retrospective, a recording that Ms. Donnelly and MoMA’s curators dug up in the museum’s storage site in Queens. (“This museum has a lot of weird stuff like that,” she whispered into the microphone.)

“The feeling when listening to these audio guides was, this was a great work of art ... or work of whatever, work of another entity or another state and dimension, existing,” she said. “[They] are so beautiful ... It’s like the Taj Mahal of languages, building it himself.” And then she delivered what may be an art writer and lecturer’s ultimate eulogy. “By the end, I don’t need the exhibition at all. I’m awash in this ocean of his funny, brilliant voice.”

Detail of Marclay's 'The Clock,' 2010. (© Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York)

This morning, the Museum of Modern Art hosted a press preview for its presentation of Christian Marclay's 24-hour film, The Clock (2010), which goes on view in a theater built in the museum's contemporary galleries tomorrow, Thursday, Dec. 21. It runs through Jan. 21. Before the film went on view this morning, MoMA's director, Glenn Lowry, discussed the work with Mr. Marclay in front of a packed house of writers in the museum's atrium.

Mr. Lowry wondered, does the artist have a favorite part in the film? "There are so many little moments," Mr. Marclay said. "There is definitely a crescendo at midnight, because midnight is when something terrible is always happening." Noon, he added, is also pretty exciting, and he's a fan of the early morning hours, when things get a little weird. (Spoiler alert: synchronized references to time disappear for some stretches early in the morning.)

One journalist noted that there appear to be clips throughout the work in which time is not explicitly shown or discussed, but Mr. Marclay emphasized that there is always some allusion to time passing. "Someone smoking a cigarette for me is about time," he said. "It's a beautiful metaphor for time. It's probably the 20th-century equivalent of the candle in the 17th century."

MoMA's staying open through the nights on three weekends (and for New Year's Eve) to allow viewers to see the late-night and early-morning hours. However, people shouldn't feel stressed about sitting through the whole thing at once, Mr. Marclay said. "It's not a marathon piece, where you have to sit there for 24 hours," he said. "It's a piece that you have to come back to when you have a moment.…You don't have to see it from beginning to end because there's no beginning and there's no end. Below, a quick guide to seeing the piece at MoMA. —A.R.

Capacity: 130 people (170 with standing room)

Getting In: First-come, first-served

24-Plus-Hour Screenings:
-- Monday, December 31, 10:30 a.m., to Tuesday, January 1, at 5:30 p.m.
-- Friday, January 4, 10:30 a.m., to Sunday, January 6, 5:30 p.m.
-- Friday, January 11, 10:30 a.m., to Sunday, January 13, 5:30 p.m.
-- Friday, January 18, 10:30 a.m., to Sunday, January 20, 5:30 p.m.

Admission After Hours: Adults are $12, seniors (65 and over) $10, students full-time with current ID $8, children (16 and under) under free, members free. Available only on site in the museum's lobby.

Food: During the New Year's Eve screening, the museum's Cafe 2 will offer desserts, cheese, salumi and wine from 10 p.m. through 1 a.m., plus an all-night espresso bar.

Updates: @TheClockatMoMA on Twitter and MoMA.org/theclock

Who Owns It? It's a promised gift to the museum from the collection of Jill and Peter Kraus.

Even if you miss part of the film this time, don't worry! As Mr. Lowry told the crowd this morning, since the work is entering the collection, it will no doubt go on view again.

'Portal' (2007). (Courtesy Wikipedia)

This morning the Museum of Modern Art announced that it has acquired 14 video games for its permanent collection in the architecture and design department.

The games selected include classics like Pac-Man (1980), Myst (1993), The Sims (2000) and Portal (2007). The full list can be found here.

"Are video games art? They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe," wrote department curator Paola Antonelli in a blog post announcing the acquisitions. "Our criteria, therefore, emphasize not only the visual quality and aesthetic experience of each game, but also the many other aspects—from the elegance of the code to the design of the player’s behavior—that pertain to interaction design."

The museum said the initial list of 14 is the first step in the institution acquiring some 40 games in the near future. The initial group will be installed at the museum's Philip Johnson Galleries in March 2013.

Thanks to Complex for pointing us to this.

MoMA. (Getty Images)

The Museum of Modern Art announced today that, beginning in May, it will stay open every single day of the week. The museum is currently closed one day a week, on Tuesday. The news came to us via The New York Times, which noted that the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently said that it was studying whether to go to an around-the-week schedule.

Carol Vogel of The Times provided some context:

"The museum was open every day since its founding in 1929, until 1975, when it closed one day a week (originally Wednesdays) to reduce operating expenses.

"National museums in the United States, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, are open every day, as are major London institutions, including the National Gallery, the Tate Modern, the Tate Britain and the Wallace Collection."

MoMA's director, Glenn Lowry, told the paper that the museum was motivated by the tremendous increase in attendance in recent years (the galleries "are pretty close to being maxed out," he said), and that it mulled staying open later some nights but that "it was always a myth that everyone really wanted late hours." The museum has stayed open on Tuesdays during the past two summers so it has experience operating on that schedule.

Now if the Guggenheim goes to seven days a week (it's open six currently), and the New Museum, Guggenheim and MoMA PS1 go to at least six days (they're at five now), this is going to become an even more beautiful museum-going age.

Avery McCarthy, "destination unknown presented by Annabel Vartanian," curated by Erin Goldberger, John Morrow at Orchard Windows Gallery
Why not see some weirder stuff as the summer winds down? Avery McCarthy uses dark room environments and digital LED lights to create abstract concepts like a grain of sand or a supernova. He's shown at Phillips de Pury, James Salomon Gallery and the Chelsea Arts Museum. Sounds fun and intense. —Dan Duray
Orchard Windows Gallery, 37 Orchard Street, New York, 6-9 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29

Discussion: What Happens After Animal Farm? John Reed with Eric Banks at McNally Jackson
John Reed discusses his unauthorized Animal Farm sequel, Snowball's Chance (2002), with former Bookforum editor Eric Banks. —Andrew Russeth
McNally Jackson, 52 Prince Street, New York, 7 p.m.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 30

Talk: Banu Cennetoğlu, "BAS / Bent," at Artists Space (Books & Talks)
Artist Banu Cennetoğlu will talk about how she began her BAS space in Karaköy, Istanbul, and her imprint Bent. Recommended for go-getters. —D.D. (Photo courtesy http://www.todayszaman.com/)
Artists Space, 55 Walker Street, New York, $5 donation, 7 p.m.

Screening: La Femme Nikita at MoMA
As part of its series of thrillers produced by French's Gaumont Film Company, MoMA offers up this Luc Besson classic, with Anne Parillaud who is transformed from a teenage drug addict into a shadowy elite government assassin. (Another screening will occur on Friday, Aug. 31, at 5:30 p.m.) —A.R.
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, 7:30 p.m.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1

Opening: David Kennedy-Cutler and Elise Ferguson at Halsey Mckay
This show brings together David Kennedy-Cutler, who makes tall Plexiglas sculptures with wild ripples and twists (he presented a nice selection at Derek Eller earlier this year), and Elise Ferguson, who makes makes paintings with the tools of a sculptor, using pigmented plaster to build up geometric abstractions. It's a doubleheader! A five-artist group show also opens at the space this evening. —A.R.
Halsey Mckay, 79 Newton Lane, East Hampton, 6–8 p.m.

'Autoritratto (Self-Portrait),' 1993, bronze and electrical and hydraulic attachments, 80 x 37 x 20 in. The Rachofsky Collection. (Photo by Andrew Russeth)

In the work, which is sightly smaller than life size, Boetti holds a thin hose that steadily feeds a stream of water onto his head. It partially evaporates into a haze of steam as he stands there, and the rest glides down his body. That steam was faint but visible on this relatively warm summer morning, but one imagines that the effect will become even more dramatic as the temperature drops in September. The show closes Oct. 1.

The exhibition's co-curator, Christian Rattemeyer, MoMA's associate curator of drawings, says in a succinct audio guide that this is the artist's final self-portrait, and it is "as if Boetti's brain is so active that it needs constant cooling, as if, in the last year of his life"—he died the next year of brain cancer—"the artist is literally burning up from the inside with creativity."

Throughout his career, Boetti removed himself from the production of his art. He had Afghani and later Pakistani women produce his most iconic pieces, his world maps, and let them inscribe their own messages along their borders. When he appeared in his works, it was often only in the most tenuous or tangential ways—as a barely visible ghost of a face in a 1969 photocopied self-portrait, in the form of the date he predicted for his death in a 1971 engraving or as two identical twins, Alighiero and Boetti, in a 1968 photomontage.

But here, at the end of his life—less than 20 years ago, which is hard to believe—he's standing right in front of us. As he douses himself with water, he doesn't look altogether happy—he's burning up with creativity, his head is stuck in a cloud—but he does look determined to deliver one last visual marvel, even at his own expense.

Every Friday, Don’t Miss It! looks at a single artwork on view in New York.

Martha Rosler. 'She Sees in Herself A New Woman Every Day (Detail).' 1976. Twelve chromogenic color prints, Plexiglas, and tape recorder. 17:21 min. Committee on Media and Performance Art Funds. © 2012 Martha Rosler (Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

On Sept. 12, the Museum of Modern Art will unveil two new performance-based exhibitions. "Performing Histories (I)" is the first of a two-part exhibition organized by Sabine Breitwieser, chief curator of the media and performance art department, that explores the variety of ways media art has engaged with history and will include recent additions to the museum's collection. On the same day, the museum will also unveil a three-part performance series with an almost identical title, "Performing Histories," which will present three live performances in conjunction with three exhibitions in the museum.

"Performance Histories (1)" will showcase nine works by some heavyweights of performance art, including The Interpreter Project (2001), a four-channel video by Sharon Hayes; She Sees in Herself A New Woman Every Day, a 1976 work by Martha Rosler that features photographs of a woman's shoes and legs and a tape recorder; and Open Your Eyes, a 2010 double slide projection by Kader Attia that explores modern Western aesthetics.

The live performance series begins with Andrea Fraser’s Men on the Line: Men Committed to Feminism, KPFK, 1972 (2012), a work based on a 1972 radio broadcast during which four men chatted on a slew of issues related to feminism. After the first performance, the series will continue in January and through the spring with such artists as Ei Arakawa, Fabian Barba, Andrea Geyer, Contact Gonzo, Sharon Hayes, Simone Forti, Eiko and Koma and Kelly Nipper, among others.

Ms. Rosler herself will be at MoMA in November when she holds her Meta-Monumental Garage Sale in MoMA’s atrium, selling off a mix of personal and donated items.