Wes Anderson Curating a Museum Exhibit in Vienna, Austria, Is a Reminder We’re Living in Peak Art Selfie Times
We’re living in peak art selfie times, and Wes Anderson is playing into it. The auteur and original aesthete is cocurating a museum exhibit in Vienna, Austria, this fall, to make your Instagram feed even better.
The director of The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Moonrise Kingdom will be collaborating on the project with his longtime design partner, Juman Malouf, at the city’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. Considering Anderson already approaches everything from wardrobe to the most mundane, tiny details like pieces of art, the director’s exhibition will no doubt be a lot to take in.
The museum’s own curator, Jasper Sharp, confirmed as much in a video statement revealing the partnership. “This autumn, we are presenting a very special exhibition which will be quite unlike anything we’ve ever done before,” he said, before giving a sense of just what kinds of artwork Anderson and Malouf will have at their disposal. “We have given Wes and Juman a very special but somewhat overwhelming invitation: to sort through all of the objects in our museum—Egyptian mummies, Greek and Roman antiquities, Old Master paintings, the Kunstkammer, the Imperial Treasury, the crown jewels, ethnographic objects from the Weltmuseum, the Theatre Museum, Schloss Ambras Innsbruck, carriages and sleighs, costumes—an embarrassment of riches! What they’re going to do, we’re not going to tell you just yet.”
Whatever they choose, it would be shocking if it didn’t adhere to a strict color palette—specifically the muted pastels and earthy shades Anderson has become known for to the point of imitation.
Anderson has opened up before about his immediately recognizable aesthetic, explaining to Time Out New York, “I feel like I’m trying to make a little world for my characters—and both the world and characters are invented for the movie. And I probably define the edges of that world a little more sharply than some.” By “sharply,” he means meticulously, as he shared with NPR, saying, “The editing…and the construction of the sets and the design of the sets, even if it’s on location—this is all carefully planned. We gather all of the ingredients and we have it very prepared so that when the day comes to shoot, everything is sort of quite set in that way.” No doubt his first museum exhibit will be just as scrupulous. After all, the small bar he designed for the campus of the museum-esque campus of the Prada Foundation in Milan is already a certifiable Instagram hit.
Related: Here’s What Food Tutorials Directed by Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino and More Would Look Like
