| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value |  |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 176 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned |  A juxtaposition of two pieces: My Egypt, by Charles Demuth, and Pittsburgh, by Elsie Driggs. Both from 1927, they present similar and yet extremely divergent visions of industrialized landscapes. One is clearly prettier than the other, and yet, as Driggs said of her grey smokestacks and pipes, “This shouldn’t be beautiful. But it is.” |
The Met’s Worst Mistake?
The Whitney Museum of American Art. Yet another art museum in our saturated city. Why does it exist? Mainly because the Met in the late 1920s didn’t care to own a vast collection of work by living American artists. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney had offered the Met her collection, with an endowment, even. Yes, the Met’s Board wouldn’t take the art even though they stood to get paid to do so.
It reminds me of the scene in the movie “Pretty Woman” where Julia Roberts gets treated miserably by the snooty store lady on Rodeo Drive, only to return later looking fabulous to point out what a humongous mistake said snooty lady had made. Which raises the question, which museum is Richard Gere?
Anyway, I will say that if any member of the Whitney family now or in the future offers to pay me to take, say, a Hopper or a Rothko, I will gladly accept that offer.
Kaisik Wong’s spacey, glam 1970s fashions look like costumes from a very trippy sci-fi film. The opposite of most of the counterculture fashion on display, and yet they fit in somehow, too.
New York City is lucky to boast not one but two extremely fine design museums — the Museum of Arts and Design and the 
Maxine Henryson’s beautiful, long, accordion-folded photobooks. Stretched out on a table, they reward much slow, close viewing.
I’m not sure Art in General belongs on a list of museums. It’s really an art gallery (in the sense of a place to buy art), albeit a nonprofit one. I’ve been giving nonprofits a pass so far, so there I went.
Grey Art Gallery is the public art museum of New York University. It consists of a small ground floor space and another subterranean gallery across the street from Washington Square Park.
I’m going with the crowd on this one, but I’m picking the Unicorn Tapestries. I just love them — the allegory, the sheer beauty, the amount of work that went into making them (and any tapestry really). I love the mystery to them — we don’t know exactly who the “A” & “E” were for whom they were made. The unicorn has a rough time of it, but they fill me with joy, and I see new things in them every time I visit. Also don’t overlook the narwhal horn tucked in the corner of the room where they reside.
This is a milestone post, my fiftieth museum review. So I decided to treat myself to my very favorite of all New York museums, The Cloisters. But now that I’ve started, I realize, what can I say about The Cloisters? I feel overmatched and inadequate. The Cloisters isn’t just my favorite museum, it’s quite possibly my favorite place. It’s so unlikely, it’s like magic or a miracle happened in this park at the far northern tip of Manhattan. But as with so many of the miracles in New York City, it was money not magic that made The Cloisters happen. 
The West Room Vault, which Charles McKim designed so that Mr. Morgan could keep his most super-special books super safe.
Many of the city’s great institutions, maybe even most of them, were gifts to the public by plutocrats looking to give something back, improve their image, or maybe atone for awful things they did to get ahead. Fro some people, it may diminish the joy of visiting somewhat to reflect on the ruthless profiteering that paid for all of it. That’s especially true of the most personality-driven institutions, like the Morgan and the Frick.
I love how the Morgan smells. The parts that are more library than museum contain enough ancient tomes that the very air is permeated with old leather, paper, and erudition.
The Japan Society’s home, Japan House, was designed in 1971, by architects Junzo Yoshimura and George Shimamoto of Gruzen & Partners, and built on a site near the United Nations donated by the Society’s then-president, John D. Rockefeller the Third. The Society’s history, however, goes back much further than that; it was founded in 1907 in the wake of an official U.S. visit by two Japanese dignitaries. Its fortunes have waxed and waned along with Japan-U.S. relations, and today the society is a great place to take a language class, hear a talk, see a movie, or see some art.
The Society’s gallery space is on the second floor, in rooms arrayed around the courtyard. They program all kinds of stuff there. It’s one of the first places I saw Haruki Murakami’s work; they’ve done great shows on crafts like contemporary Japanese basketwaving and ceramics; they did a show a couple of years ago on cats in Japanese art (I bet the 
The current show is called A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints, and looks at societal impressions of essentially tween- and teenage boys in early modern Japan. It makes the case that they were viewed as beautiful and desirable by both men and women, and displays a variety of contemporary woodblock prints, books, and other artifacts to examine how they were depicted and described in that society.
Unless you’re a fan of the Land of the Rising Sun (full disclosure, I am a fan, and have been a member of the Japan Society for well over a decade) I don’t think the Japan Society generally merits a special trip to the far eastern reaches of midtown Manhattan. But they put on a good show, and if you happen to be by the United Nations it’s an excellent place to imbibe some culture that will almost certainly be beautiful and interesting.
Jesse Chun’s Landscape series. What look like stylized, slightly monochrome landscape prints and turn out to be extremely enlarged images from passport pages. They are beautiful, meaningful, and you can play “what country is that?” with them.
Lehman College occupies a lovely campus (built as the Bronx campus of Hunter College in 1931) in the far northern reaches of the Bronx, a couple of stops south of the terminus of the number 4 train. Like most colleges, its architecture is a mix of classical and modern, the former mostly beautiful, the latter mostly notsomuch.
Lehman College’s Fine Arts Building (modern) is home to a small museum space, divided into two galleries. On the day I visited, one of them was filled with propaganda posters from the first and second World Wars. It was also in the midst of having its floor painted, and therefore while I could peek in, I couldn’t enter without tracking paint all over the creation, which the painting contractors politely asked me not to do.
Space number two was the larger, arranged around a central column supporting the roof of the building, which sloped down from all sides to the column, in a modern show of form following function, of the sort that makes me think, “yes, it does, but you could’ve done it differently and gotten both better function and better form.”
I didn’t quite know what to expect from a community college in the far reaches of the Bronx. Lehman’s other current show, “Alien Nations,” surprised and delighted me. I’m used to contemporary art being hit or miss — everyone’s tastes are different, and mine are notably quirky, so in any show of young, contemporary artists I expect to see at most one or two pieces I really like, and rather more that I really don’t. This show fired on all cylinders. 
The museum occupies a modern building that has a very early-millennium feel to it (it opened in 2004). One of the things this project is giving me is a very strong sense of how hard it is to do a glass atrium for a museum that doesn’t age like a 1980s Marriott. The Bronx Museum has an atrium that must’ve looked fresh and modern when it opened, but already, not so much. It’s a real museum, though, with a tiny gift shop, a (lackluster) cafe, and expansive gallery spaces on the ground floor, and an event area and terrace on the second floor.
You enter the building into an oddly shaped (ah, the vogue for asymmetry in the early 2000s) space, containing the ticket/info desk and the cafe, as well as a ramp that leads to one gallery space and from there to stairs up to the second floor.
Something that’s stuck with me from my visit is this sign, a patient explanation in English, Spanish, and French about why you shouldn’t touch artworks in museums. My first reaction was that of a smug, overeducated museum veteran. And I wondered whether the sort of person inclined to touch a piece of art in a museum is the type of person who’d bother reading a sign that explains why that’s bad for the art. But on further reflection I see in it an indicator that this museum’s constituency isn’t generally me.
The Bronx has gone all in on Cuba. It’s currently running a show called Wild Noise/Ruido Salvage on contemporary Cuban art from the 1970s until now. This show is dynamite. Complex, diverse, and expansive, I came away from it feeling like I have a sense of the breadth of Cuban art today. I also feel like if this show were at say the Brooklyn Museum or even one of the smaller art museums of Manhattan, it would be something of a blockbuster. The museum claims that this is “the most extensive cultural exchange between Cuba and the United States in five decades” and also says that five years of work and research went into this. I believe it. Super timely, and canny in other ways, too: a significant number of the pieces in the exhibit are now part of the museum’s collection.
Finally there were some pretty colored acrylic abstractions by Arlene Slavin on the terrace, and a series of photographs by Clayton Frazier of the people of St. Dominique (aka Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
Oh and a chunk of the old Yankee Stadium. Because it is the Bronx.