-
Photos
Archives
Categories
- Beginnings (6)
- Development (6)
- Diary (9)
- Family (3)
- HTML/CSS (1)
- Human Being (1)
- Implications (2)
- Industry (3)
- Life (60)
- Philosophy (27)
- Politics (6)
- Pop culture (7)
- Thoughts (8)
- Travel (48)
- Web (6)
-
Museums of New York
- del.ico.us
- digg this!
- Last edited: 14:23, Jul 09 2007
- Skip to comments (4)
The school trip version of New York: natural history, art from every period and culture, history and a smattering of politics.
New York is renowned for it’s museums but the sheer number meant that there was no way I could either visit them all or tolerate visiting them all. In the end I managed to get to the Natural History Museum (the setting of that rotten movie Night at the Museum), the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Musem of Modern Art (the Met), and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).
The Natural History Museum
The Natural History Museum was the first I visited, with Yogi and Adam, two very gay boys from Vancouver, and Roy the Israeli, who had just returned from 6 months in South America. Yogi and Adam managed to make the benign trip to the museum into a weird sexual fantasy land where every exhibit was interpreted with more meanings than the information plaques were revealing - to Roy’s embarrassment. Unfortunately (as we were to discover in the Met) New York museums tend to be HUGE and very quickly we tired of seeing more facts about animals, minerals or vegetables. Roy and I left early as Yogi and Adam had ducked into a show explaining the birds and the bees about the creation of the Universe. Luckily this museum and the Met are both donation, so I returned later in my stay to explore the dinosaur floor in more detail. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise, dinosaurs are awesome! Especially when the skeletons on display are the ones in your childhood picture books.
The Guggenheim Museum
The second museum was the Guggenheim which from the outside was a complete let down. As I understand it - and I might have my facts wrong but I won’t let that get in the way of a good whinge - Frank Lloyd Wright designed a fantastic spiral building to house the private Guggenheim collection, which then got built on the cheap and has been falling apart ever since. The only proper solution would be to knock the building down and start again from Wright’s original plans. That will be for a future time in history when people will dare to suggest such bold moves, as only now has the art world started grappling with replacing art and calling it the original. We must be content with scrubbing off last times touch up job, patching up the cracks and giving it a new lick of paint; all of which requires two years of scaffolding to hide the wondrous exterior from the tourists.
Fortunately for the said disappointed tourists, the inside is still bloody marvelous and after absorbing the abstract art collection I proceeded to make my own using the forms of the spiral interior. The actual art collection is private and is meant to exemplify modern and particularly abstract art. A premise which I love due to my affinity with the universal ideals of modern art. And I bought a wicked tshirt.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The next museum was the Met… THE MET! (boom! boom! boom! boom! boom! boom!). Whoever built this museum a: has way too much access to way too many parts of the world and way too much money, and b: is on crack because it is incredibly difficult to navigate the many halls of exhibits. The Met is huge. Yogi, Adam and I spent half a day there and only got through the Ancient Greek and Roman halls - two halls out of around 16! We returned with a plan to spend only 30 minutes on average in each hall. Luckily two of them were American (what do you mean there are Americas?) Arts and Crafts, so we could race through those sections.
I got surprised by the Met and I wasn’t expecting it. It is my first real museum, which means the first museum I have been to where all of the artworks are obviously old and not so obvious in their legal origin. This didn’t occur to me until I walked into the room containing the entire Temple of Dendur from Egypt. They had an entire temple transported block by block from Egypt to be placed in an internal pond inside the Met museum in the middle of Central Park, New York. It gave me the twinge about context that I normally reserve for African wildlife in Western Zoos. “It’s all about educating the public” I reminded myself, only to be surprisingly offended by an exhibit in the next room. Stained glass windows inlaid into the white walls of the museum. What monsters! How could they pull these out of the gothic church where they made such contrasts of vertical light and colour with the dark vertical alcoves. Oh wait - these are just like that Egyptian temple thingy: artefacts purchased, gifted or taken from their homeland and stuck in a gallery for our education and amusement. What strange institutions museums are. Needless to say I got over myself and didn’t contact the staff about their cultural insensitivity in having such hallowed ornaments of my particular cultural heritage on display.
The Museum of Modern Art
Save the best till last. An unfortunate expression to describe my feelings towards the MOMA is that I creamed my pants when I saw the collection. The layout of the museum is again awful, although nothing beats the Met in pure insanity, and the MOMA is expensive at $20 for an adult unless you can convince the staff that you are a student - not that I would have done that.
Nevertheless, upon arriving on the 5th floor where the collection starts its descent down the floors, I was greeted by Van Gogh’s Starry Starry Night as well as many Gauguins and Seurats. These were followed by the largest collection I have seen of post-impressionists, futurists, dadaists, constructivists, cubists, De Stijl artists, abstract expressionists, minimalists, pop artists and other -isms which I don’t recognise or forget. The highlights for me were:
- Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie which was a late New York and jazz inspired departure from his black line, tri-chromatic rectangle formula;
- Malevich’s white square on white background as a representation of the Universal Truth;
- Monet’s massive Water Lillies which up close resemble large blobs of paint on multiple canvases occupying one wall of the room, but from afar form an amazing depiction of reflected and refracted light in water (my high school art teacher Mr Leuse waxed lyrical about these for years);
- Anything by Marcel Duchamp which included a stool with a bicycle wheel stuck in it and a shovel dangling from the ceiling.
Honourable mention
The United Nations felt just like a museum, equipped with artworks, history and information boards. Unfortunately for it’s relevancy it felt older than the other museums: the carpet was worn, the seats were loose and creaky and a musty smell permeated the entire building. One word can be used to describe the U.N.: underfunded. The headquarters are in desperate need of an overhaul, but given the lack of funding for operations and it’s deemed irrelevancy by the likes of John Bolton, increased funding in the near future is not likely. And has Ban Ki-moon done anything news worthy since assuming his secretary-generalship? I fear for the idea and the institution of the United Nations - a living museum and some might say theater or comedy.
