NYC Meditations, Part 3: Crowds at MoMA

The Sixth Borough, the occupying forces of Heat which held this city under its sweaty 95-degree thumb all weekend, dissippated last night with a water-logged T-storm bang, which yours truly was caught in the middle of (requiring me to hide out in the foyer of one of the downtown Federal Buildings). But before this, during the day, I hit up the newly-remodeled Museum of Modern Art to hang out with some friends from college: Klee, Kandinsky, Gorky, Pollock, Boccioni, Seurat, Cezanne, Bacon, and all the other great Modernists.

Unfortunately, Mr. Savvy Art Patron here attended said museum on a Sunday, meaning it was packed with tourists and hence, designed to enact the exact opposite state of mind I was hoping to achieve. As a former painter myself, I know that the great paintings are meditations, obsessive objects delicately balanced over long periods of time, only completed when the artist's mind is fully at peace with them. This "finished" state, stretched on pieces of canvas many square feet in size, is the quality that literally takes our breathe away when we see a great piece of art. Yet try realizing this when a French family of four is shoving their goddamn cameras in front of Van Gogh's Starry Night before they race off to bag and tag the next art trophy.

I honestly do not understand this aquisitive consumer culture sometimes. Note that the majority of tourists only take photos of the famous paintings, such as the aforementioned Van Gogh, or Dali's The Persistence of Memory, or Monet's infernal Water Lilies-- images these same people have seen thousands of times before in books, magazines, and on the internet. Why bother creating one more reproduction for yourself? Why not take the time to actually experience the original, get a sense for how the artist held his brush, stretched the canvas, and experienced the composition in its moment of creation? It seems our dear consumers were too busy managing children, making dinner plans, and looking out the window (I was aghast to see person after person brush by th Futurist Boccioni's Developmet of a Bottle in Space" in order to get a glimpse at some neighboring luxury penthouses) to let the experience of great art sink in. Hakim Bey said it best in his essay "Overcoming Tourism":

Even though tourists appear to be physically present in Nature or Culture, in effect one might call them ghosts haunting ruins, lacking all bodily presence. They're not really there, but rather move through a mind­scape, an abstraction("Nature», «Culture»), collecting images rather than experience. All too frequently their vacations are taken in the midst of other peoples' misery and even add to that misery.

It was with great irony then that I noticed how much the crowds thinned out as the gallery's path progressed through the Late Modernists (Rauschenberg, Warhol, Stella) into Conceptual Art (work so bland I can't recall a single name), as it was essentially consumer capitalism, and the incredible rates of social change it fomented, that led to these artistic dead ends in the first place. Thankfully, my faith in the future of art was restored by some of the work found in the New Acquisitions Gallery and with it, my faith in humanity in general.

Paul Chan's Happiness (finally) after 35,000 Years of Civilization—after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier, a 17-minute Flash movie displayed on a wide LCD screen and depicting the life cycle of a food/sex-crazed utopian commune from wide-eyed inspiration to White Male suppression, was clearly one of the most touching things I've seen in years (the long lines waiting to see it agreed with me), both poignant and pop-savvy at the same time. A second new fave was a rejected model for the new World Trade Center site, which consisted of five free-standing structures which also, paradoxically, all lean on each other. But by far the most encouraging new idea was The High Line, a plan to redevelop an abandoned elevated train line on the city's west side into a nature-friendly pedestrain walkway -- with fish ponds! -- and outdoor entertainment center. The collective cognitive load of so many honest simple world citizens -- struggling all day to understand the scribblings of Cy Twombly or the relevance of Fluxus -- came to a hopeful sigh of relief at the site of a room full of architectural renderings and models depicting what the world could look like should artist become re-engaged.

Soon after viewing The High Line I left, plunging headlong into the deep dark city streets, with clouds brewing overhead and a rock show on my horizon (more on that later perhaps).