| 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. |
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.