Art-chitecture

The Guggenheim Museum is quite possibly one of the best architectural structures in all of New York. The way that it is set up allows us to see the art without interruption. Each floor spirals into the next and all the walls are lined with art. One might say that the real art is the museum itself. Picasso Black and White was the first exhibit we saw and from their we entered a world of abstract human bodies. All over there were paintings called "Woman Lying Down" or "Woman Standing Up" that looked more like demons after a really bad surgical procedure. I don't really understand abstract images of the human body. They don't look nice and if someone portrayed me that way I would have a heart attack. Although, I can't enjoy it, I can appreciate the work that the artists put into it and the idea that we need to rethink our definition of beauty. It still looks ugly to me though.

Frick

The Frick Collection is one of the most amazing ones that I've experienced in this class. They hang regally in fancy rooms that you might imagine someone with a powdered wig walked through at some point in history. More than the beautiful art, Mr. Frick's fascination with it impressed me. He had money and spent it on beautiful things that don't just sit there, but allow him to think constantly unlike people today. When a person has enough money, their first thought is to buy an iPad rather than a painting.

Although, Frick has fantastic taste and the paintings and other decorations that he chose for what was originally his home are pretentious and unwelcoming, However the drawing room that he created to fit his wife's tastes appealed to everyone much more than any other room. It was light and uplifting. There were a series of paintings; all illustrating the progression of love, as aided by cupid. The pictures were fruity and borderline ethereal and made you attuned to the romance more than any other paintings in the house. Though the paintings were beautiful and the first thing your eyes are drawn to in the room, I felt that the most beautiful piece in the room was a small unnoticeable statuette. I didn't see it and wouldn't have without the tour guide pointing it out it to me. It was a nude man and woman about to kiss with tiny cherubic cupid babies crawling all over them. The beauty in it was that it wasn't overtly sexual, but showed the most intimate part of love.

The Brooklyn Museum

 Before the trip that I went on to The Brooklyn Museum, I'd honestly never heard of it in my entire life, which is a pity, because it was beautiful. We saw an exhibit called, "The Dinner Party" that was dedicated to women that were ignored, but had a strong impact on our history. There was a large triangular table that had thirteen plates on each side, each one more intricate than the next, perfectly customized for each woman to symbolize their achievements. And, since there aren't only thirty nine important women in our history, the pedestal it was placed on had other names written on it.

Obviously, this type of art is more physical than anything and to experience it properly one would have to walk around and look and, when no one was looking, touch (just kidding; don't do that). Although, I feel that the real point of the table is not to look at the freaky plates, but to look and imagine actual women sitting in those chairs. You find that, even though when you think of women being ignored in history sitting together. the imagination only allows you to see grandiose speeches and proclamations of freedom. But, in reality, it would look like women eating together, talking to each other and sharing their experiences, as anyone else would. The idea that Mother Theresa and Eleanor Roosevelt could sit together and eat allows us to understand that these significant people can't be judged by gender, because they do everything that we do like eat and converse, therefore, anyone can become them.

Stars in My Eyes

The MoMA has so much art that has had a significant impact on the art world. However, while I was actually walking through the museum, all I could think about was Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night; what must be the best painting to ever grace this world. Clearly many others thought the same thing, since you could barely see it through all the phones and people posing next to it. Starry Night defines everything that anyone could ever want. We want to reach for the stars. We strive to know more about them. They are mysterious and beautiful and, as a New Yorker, basically invisible to me.

Van Gogh was not a successful artist in his time. He was poor and his art went unappreciated, because during his time the only art that was considered good art was realistic, which his was not. The painting shows a new perspective; that of a man who had nothing, but saw everything and though he was depressed and would take his own life later, he was able to put brush to canvas and show the world that  there was so much beauty in the universe and so much color, that one would only have to look to the skies to find it. God, I love Van Gogh.

The Whitney Museum Gets Me

Most Museums, I feel, try to separate themselves from the norm so that they can attract different types of people. This is exactly the wrong way to approach the experience. I like to walk into a museum and feel like all my preconceived notions are being disproved; like I'm learning something. The Gallery's name, "Sinister Pop", changes your perception of the art that you see while you are looking at them. One of the more interesting works was a chair made out of flowers on a white pedestal. This, under different circumstances would be a beautiful and innocent piece, but in this particular gallery, the subtext changes drastically.

Upon further thinking of what dark undertones might be hidden in this seemingly sincere flowery chair, I began to think that the chair actually signified human greed. As a race, we are constantly looking for new and improved ways to live our lives, which allows us to spend less time trying to survive so that we can focus on more important things, like having higher levels of thinking. Along the way, though, we are distracted by our need to outdo one another. A chair made of flowers is impractical and ridiculous, but in order to illustrate our superiority over other people, we spend all of our time and energy obsessing over having flowery chairs and iPads so that we can prove that we are successful and happy.

Like a Shark

The MoMA has several different types of art that make similar statements, but the one that spoke to me personally was Margaret Lee's piece. As I walk into the room where the work is displayed, the first thing I notice is the warmth, limited space and the cucumber wall phone. A roter is connected to a cucumber rather than a phone. This took a minute to process and when I turned to the rest of the room, I noticed and eggplant phone on a table. Upon hearing my peers talk about the meaning of the strange household appliances, I saw that their perspective differed from my own. They said that it was a connection between technology and nature; that everything is ultimately one. I saw uselessness. The most important use of a phone is for it to make calls; that is it's only job. This, I think, spoke to the fact that old technologies have been abandoned for better, slicker models. Cell phones can access the internet, send text messages and have an important place in our everyday lives. Landline phones might as well be connected to cucumbers because they have outstayed their welcome in the twenty first century. My stance on the industrialization of our civilization is that we need to abandon things that hold us back and move forward. Never look back.