MoMA to Cherish

The Monday of our New York trip was rainy, but we didn't have outdoor plans that day. Our destination that morning was the Museum of Modern Art (or MoMA, as it's popularly called).

We had a few other museums on our agenda for the trip, each with a different flavor. MoMA was one to go to because it had many artists -- and even specific paintings -- you'd recognize instantly, including Van Gogh's Starry Night...

Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans...

...and more. We started by heading to the top floor, the sixth, and working our way down. This turned out to be a great approach, as the museum was arranged from oldest to newest work, with the newest at the top. That top floor felt like one giant joke to me.

On the one hand, the MoMA gift shop sold merchandise with the perfect rejoinder to my reaction: "Modern Art = I Could Do That + Yeah, But You Didn't." Okay, fair enough. But on the other hand, in my job, I work with amazing artists whose worst two-minute rough I'd put in a gallery before this stuff. There were church pew-like benches, which had to be monitored by a museum worker so that people wouldn't sit on the "art." There was a huge bin of bubbling mud, an urban Yellowstone thermal feature? There were the scribblings that, if done by my nephew, wouldn't make it to my sister's refrigerator.

There were odd sculptures that reminded me of high school. Back then, the theater geeks and I had access to the school's auditorium, and we'd slip in there occasionally to rearrange leftover props and scenery on stage as "modern art." We should have saved that stuff, or at least photographed it, because we managed better than this...

On the other hand -- and I guess this gets into the subjectivity of art -- there were a lot of works (basically on every other floor) that to me showed a lot more thought or effort (or both), and that caught much more of my attention. That included a giant inflatable rendering of a rotary fan, a series of headache inducing experiments with tight geometric patterns, a giant wall of pitch black carved wooden panels, and whatever this strangely compelling thing is...

Add to that the chance to see some works by Picasso (including sculptures, which I hadn't even known he did), Gauguin, and more. All told, the Museum of Modern Art was a wonderfully entertaining afternoon, even if that top floor hadn't seemed like a great start.