Free Night at MoMA
MoMA is free on Friday evenings between 4 and 8 pm. So I went on Friday after work, to save twenty dollars (!) and see what all the fuss is about. It was my first time.
Impressions? MoMA doesn't do for me what the Met does. It's good, it's just not the same crazy freakout.
Hierarchy of visual art forms, according to Katherine:
(1) Representational portraits of people
(2) Crowd scenes, group portraits, city & townscapes without people
(3) Sculpture, including furniture and "design" specimens
(4) Completely abstract art
(5) Still lives
(6) Landscapes without buildings or people
There are exceptions, for instance my quasi-spiritual feelings about certain really big Jackson Pollock action paintings (of which MoMA has a great one), or my love for those hyper-realistic Dutch still-lives of mounds of food and flowers that are supposed to remind you that sic transit gloria and stuff. For the most part, though, I found myself in MoMA having to walk through several rooms befor finding something I could really sink my teeth into.
But still, I was thnking, and not to sound like Kant or anything, but I really enjoy the exercise of taste. And then, aside from enjoying it as an activity, the whole idea of taste fascinates me. So much of what we do, in our society of hyper-abundance, is decide what we do and don't enjoy, aesthetically. What's up with that? And what's up with all the time and energy we spend justifying and analyzing our judgments of taste?? And looking for people who share them???
My favorite thing in the MoMA is that Jackson Pollock I mentioned. The rooms that house the permanent collections are trippy to walk through because they contain so many 'greatest hits' that we've all seen time and time again in reproductions. But as it turns out, "Les Demoiselles du Avignon" leaves me cold, Picasso mostly leaves me cold (I kind of knew that already)..."Les Demoiselles" is hideous. Which is probably the point. But when it comes to 20th-century Frenchy depictions of humanity gone rancid, give me Toulouse-Lautrec any day, please.
The special exhibition right now is on Dada, which again I found amusing but not all that moving emotionally. More kind of interesting on an intellectual level. Why did nonsense seem like an appropriate way to fight fascism and war? Or the rise of mass production> The latter makes more sense, bt then when it domes to mass production, Dada doesn't seem to have been entirely a protest movement, either.
On a less heady note, the exhibit reminded me of how I used to make a lot of collages, and made me want to do that again.
The design wing, by the same token,
(a) freaked me out anew about plastics
(b) made me yearn to work with physical objects. Seriously, I've always been pretty good with my hands, and now I've got no outlet for it.
Someday, years from now, I'll quit my job to renovate an old house. Lifelong dream and all that. I'll work with three-dimensional things all day, and it will rule rule rule.
Impressions? MoMA doesn't do for me what the Met does. It's good, it's just not the same crazy freakout.
Hierarchy of visual art forms, according to Katherine:
(1) Representational portraits of people
(2) Crowd scenes, group portraits, city & townscapes without people
(3) Sculpture, including furniture and "design" specimens
(4) Completely abstract art
(5) Still lives
(6) Landscapes without buildings or people
There are exceptions, for instance my quasi-spiritual feelings about certain really big Jackson Pollock action paintings (of which MoMA has a great one), or my love for those hyper-realistic Dutch still-lives of mounds of food and flowers that are supposed to remind you that sic transit gloria and stuff. For the most part, though, I found myself in MoMA having to walk through several rooms befor finding something I could really sink my teeth into.
But still, I was thnking, and not to sound like Kant or anything, but I really enjoy the exercise of taste. And then, aside from enjoying it as an activity, the whole idea of taste fascinates me. So much of what we do, in our society of hyper-abundance, is decide what we do and don't enjoy, aesthetically. What's up with that? And what's up with all the time and energy we spend justifying and analyzing our judgments of taste?? And looking for people who share them???
My favorite thing in the MoMA is that Jackson Pollock I mentioned. The rooms that house the permanent collections are trippy to walk through because they contain so many 'greatest hits' that we've all seen time and time again in reproductions. But as it turns out, "Les Demoiselles du Avignon" leaves me cold, Picasso mostly leaves me cold (I kind of knew that already)..."Les Demoiselles" is hideous. Which is probably the point. But when it comes to 20th-century Frenchy depictions of humanity gone rancid, give me Toulouse-Lautrec any day, please.
The special exhibition right now is on Dada, which again I found amusing but not all that moving emotionally. More kind of interesting on an intellectual level. Why did nonsense seem like an appropriate way to fight fascism and war? Or the rise of mass production> The latter makes more sense, bt then when it domes to mass production, Dada doesn't seem to have been entirely a protest movement, either.
On a less heady note, the exhibit reminded me of how I used to make a lot of collages, and made me want to do that again.
The design wing, by the same token,
(a) freaked me out anew about plastics
(b) made me yearn to work with physical objects. Seriously, I've always been pretty good with my hands, and now I've got no outlet for it.
Someday, years from now, I'll quit my job to renovate an old house. Lifelong dream and all that. I'll work with three-dimensional things all day, and it will rule rule rule.
posted by katherine | 10:05 PM
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