I spent this evening at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). They have this concept of “target free friday nights” where they allow visitors free entry after 4pm on Friday evenings (on Friday alone, the museum is open till 8pm), so I happily went to take advantage of it. It was already 630 by the time I got there and I had to make a pit stop at the museum cafe since I was awfully hungry, yet it allowed me more than sufficient time to inspect all that I had to inspect.
I have a confession to make. I’m not a big fan of art. It doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate art. Just that I don’t have the patience to look at a picture from several thousand angles and make several thousand interpretations and then pass judgment on it. In that sense, for me, art is not like writing, it’s more like the cinema. See it once, form judgment, maybe blog about it and move on. I’m mentioning this here because I don’t want you to form wrong impressions of my while reading this essay.
I had a bit more than an hour to cover the museum and I spent most of my time on the fifth floor, in the “paintings and sculpture 1” section. This had a fair bit of hifunda stuff, but my level of interest in art is such that apart from Picasso, I don’t remember any of the artists’ names. Even if some of these pictures were to be shown to me in some quiz some day I don’t think I’ll recognize them. Some of it was brilliant, though, and I regret not taking along my new camera (I went straight from work). I hope to make amends by taking along my camera when I visit the Metropolitan Museum tomorrow.
I found most of the work underwhelming, though. I felt that this whole idea of “sculpture” is a complete fraud, and the biggest fraud of them all is Marcel Duchamp (no, I didn’t see “fountain” but saw some of his other “artwork”). Looking at everything it felt like I too can assemble a bunch of random objects, call a bunch of brilliant friends and ask them to interpret, and I have a great piece of art! I felt similarly underwhelmed by looking at Piet Mondrion’s paintings. Just felt like a random collection of lines.
Ok so now I’ve got this fantastic idea – of “art parties”. Basically the hosts have to collect a set of random objects, or draw some random stuff on a canvas and get in a bunch of intellectual friends. Liquor should be served and under the influence of alcohol, the brilliance of the friends will flourish, and important insights about the art will be made! New interpretations will come up, new art will get formed. Then, all guests together create another piece of art, and all together will interpret it. Great art will be produced in copious amounts by this process!
I continued my way downwards through the museum. Nothing else worth of mention here was found. There was some brilliant stuff which I wanted to hang on my walls. There was mostly stuff that I considered ordinary. Oh, and I must mention that the most underwhelming stuff (in my opinion) was in this hall sponsored by Richard S Fuld Jr. Now you know why a certain company went under a year back!