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May 24, 2017

Museum of Arts and Design

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	132 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	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.

Museum of Arts and Design, New York New York City is lucky to boast not one but two extremely fine design museums — the Museum of Arts and Design and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Augmented by the estimable design collections at MoMA and The Met.

Does it really need two design museums, though? I think it does. The Cooper Hewitt and the Museum of Arts and Design (“MAD”) feel extremely different. MAD’s collection starts at midcentury, shaping its outlook and sensibilities. Cooper goes deeper and can do more with historical context. I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that the one is like MoMA and the other is like The Met. But it’s not necessarily unfair to make that comparison, either.

Continue reading “Museum of Arts and Design”

April 30, 2017May 2, 2017

The Cloisters

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	115 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	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. Continue reading “The Cloisters”

April 4, 2017April 7, 2017

Museum of the City of New York

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	203 minutes across 2 days. I had a lot I wanted to see.
Best thing I saw or learned	On display in “New York at its Core” show is the scrap of paper, literally the back of an envelope, on which Milton Glaser scribbled “I ♥︎NY.” It’s such a quintessential statement it’s hard to imagine someone had to invent it, but Glaser did, in 1977. That little idea changed the way generations of visitors think about this crazy place, and it elegantly expresses a sentiment I feel (almost) every day.

The Museum of the City of New York is an absolute treasure. It occupies a really lovely Georgian/Federal-style building at the northern end of Museum Mile on Fifth Avenue. The Museum started out its life in Gracie Mansion, but as its collection and ambitions grew, and its directors wanted it to be more central, a move seemed prudent.

I confess I always assumed the building was legitimately old, though on reflection that doesn’t make sense. Who in the 1800s would build a grand federal style institutional building that far north? The building was started for the museum in 1929, and it was completed in 1932.

For all that it’s merely fake old, it’s got one of the best staircases of any museum in the city, a super-elegant curve leading up from the ground floor. Nowadays complemented by a terrific light sculpture.

It also claims to have the most exciting stairwell in the city, so it’s definitely got a New Yorker’s flair for self-promotion.

Off the top of my head, other great staircases, if you’re a scalaphile or like making a dramatic entrance, can be found at the Neue Gallerie, the Czech Center, the Frick Collection (but you can’t go on it), the Cooper Hewitt, the Rubin, and of course the grand stairs at the Met (both the outside and inside ones). Come to list them, there are a lot of great staircases in New York City museums. But City of New York’s is still near the top.

I also have to say a word or two about typography. Most museums manage signage and wall descriptions okay, but not great. But it matters. City of New York does its visuals stunningly well. Legible, fun, brash… It makes navigating the museum a pleasure.

The main exhibit on currently is called “New York at its Core,” a look at the full sweep of the city’s history, from the earliest beginnings to the future. It’s extremely well thought out, covering an immense amount of content economically and judiciously. It also makes great use of interactive features. Person-height vertical screens in the middle of the main room feature key historical characters on a rotating basis. Interact with a character and you get more, potentially much more, about them and their contribution. And it’s not just human characters, you can find out about players like beavers and oysters, too. I’m often skeptical of the value of these kinds of things. Too often they are more sizzle than steak. But this impressed me a lot.

Other exhibits look at the Gilded Age, protests in New York (no small topic), photos of Muslim life in the city, and an in-depth look at the city’s zoning laws on the centennial of the original 1916 law.

Let me underscore that. This museum can make a visually and intellectually interesting show out of the city’s zoning laws.

Graphic showing the number of pages in NYC’s Zoning Laws, 1916-present

Then there’s the Stettheimer dollhouse, with its legit modern art. And the cafe (great, by the way, and at the top of the grand staircase).

And the future bit of “New York at its Core” where via touchscreen you can design a building, streetscape or neighborhood and have it rated based on affordability and livability and environmentalism. Neat, fun, and yet again way better implemented than is typical for that sort of technology.

And finally, as I do wherever I can, I will mention Alexander Hamilton, who is present, larger than life size, on the facade.

Should you go? Absolutely. City of New York epitomizes great museuming in my book. It balances edification and entertainment with great finesse, and tells the story of this place such that both newcomers and lifelong New Yorkers can get something fresh and interesting out of it.

For Reference:

Address	1220 Fifth Avenue (at 103rd Street), Manhattan
Website	mcny.org
Cost	General Admission: $18

March 27, 2017January 14, 2018

Hall of Fame for Great Americans

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	46 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Honestly, the whole thing, as a total work of art, history, sociology, Americana, and miraculous survival. The whole Hall of Fame is the best part of the Hall of Fame.

Halls of fame today are two-a-penny. Everyone and everything from minor league lacrosse to rock n roll has a hall of fame. But it wasn’t always that way. There had to be, at some point, a first one.

The Hall of Fame for Great Americans was the first hall of fame in history. Designed by the ubiquitous Stanford White as part of his broader super-classical design for NYU’s campus in the then-bucolic Bronx at the turn of the 20th century, the Hall of Fame was a shining beacon on a hill, inspiring Americans everywhere by demonstrating greatness across all fields of endeavor. And American greatness at that. Continue reading “Hall of Fame for Great Americans”

March 7, 2017April 11, 2021

The Frick Collection

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	125 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Contemporary critics weren’t always kind to JMW Turner, accusing him of being “unrealistic” and using “blinding” light effects. So he painted the story of Regulus, a Roman general who was captured by Carthage and (among other tortures) had his eyelids cut out and was forced to stare at the sun until he was blinded, before being killed. Turner painted a port where you can barely make out Regulus, and dominating the painting is light, light light. Touche, Turner.

UPDATE APRIL 2021: The Frick Collection’s 5th Avenue mansion is closed for the next several years for a major renovation. The good news is Mr. Frick’s art has an temporary home in the old Whitney Building, the former Met Breuer, giving it a chance to recontextualize the art and juxtapose and present its art in exciting new ways. I’ll be writing about it soon, I hope. Spoiler alert: I love it!

This is going to be a hard one to write. I’ve been going to the Frick Collection regularly for over 20 years. I’m a member there. It’s my second favorite museum in New York City (the Cloisters is number one). Everyone needs to go to the Frick Collection.

Henry Clay Frick may have been a plutocrat industrialist, but he had such an eye for art. And the Frick, like the Gardner in Boston or the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, is his collection of art, much of it hung as he liked it, in rooms that were his rooms, now open to the public.

Continue reading “The Frick Collection”