Category: NYC

I haven’t been to the Met or MoMA in some time. Between bad weather and bad health, I just haven’t been able to get into New York. I finally talked myself into it today, despite today being a fairly grey and rainy day. I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to check off my wish list.

First, I wanted to see at least one of Ai Weiwei’s Good Fences Make Good Neighbors things. So I saw the “Gilded Cage” at the south end of Central Park. (That was kind of accidental. I had some transportation difficulties that left me at Columbus Circle, so I walked over from there.) I’m glad I saw it, but there’s really not much to it. I understand the point of it, but it didn’t really do anything for me.

Then, from there, I decided to walk up to the Met Breuer. They only have two exhibitions running right now, but one of them is the Edvard Munch exhibit, which I really wanted to see. I really liked that one. I’d never really seen much of his work before, so a lot of it was new to me, and unexpected.

After that, I walked up to the Met (5th Ave), wandered around, and saw a few exhibits, including the David Hockney exhibit, which I’ve been wanting to see since Thanksgiving. That was really good, but very crowded. (They had members early hours on that yesterday and Friday, but I didn’t want to take the day off Friday, and I didn’t want to go in so early yesterday.)

From there, I took a cab down to MoMA. There wasn’t much going on there that I was interested in, but it was fun to wander around a bit. And I had an idea that I’d get lunch near there, at Xi’an Famous Foods. But it was way too crowded in there, so I gave up on that. (Getting some cumin lamb noodles was definitely on my wish list for today. Maybe next time.)

I put a few random photos from the trip up on Flickr. Nothing impressive; I just snapped a few things for the hell of it.

Oh, and I didn’t realize until I got home, but today is Jackson Pollock’s birthday. I did manage to see my favorite Pollock paintings at both the Met and MoMA during this trip, so that’s cool.

I really needed to get out of my apartment and spend the day looking at art. This coming week is going to be rough. The State of the Union speech is on Tuesday. I’ve told myself that I’m not going to watch it, but I know I’m going to read about it, and it’s probably going to anger, depress, and/or annoy me. Then, I have the anniversary of my Mom’s death on Thursday and the anniversary of my brother’s death on Friday. So it’s going to be one of those weeks. I think I’m going to need art, and comics, and music, and maybe a little booze, to get through this week!

A Mystery Solved: Why the ‘Sisyphus Stones’ Rise and Tumble – from the NY Times. This sounds like something i would have liked to see. The article is from September, so there’s a good chance that it’s all gone now, but maybe not.

And this reminds me that there have been a few interesting public art installations in NYC recently that I’ve wanted to see. I’ve probably missed a few, since I’m not always that organized about remembering them; I usually see something that sounds interesting, and save a bookmark to it, then forget about it. But there is an Ai Weiwei thing called Good Fences Make Good Neighbors going on right now that’s pretty interesting. It’s also pretty spread out though. (Here’s a link to a map.)

From An Eye-Popping Mid-Century Apartment Filled With Pollocks, Klines, and de Koonings:

Ben Heller bought Jackson Pollock’s One, Number 31, 1950, when he lived in an apartment with lower ceilings. When he and Pollock installed the painting, it was too tall for the room; Pollock shrugged and stapled the top few inches of the canvas to the ceiling.

I have one Pollock print in my apartment. Imagine having three Pollock originals in your apartment.

I decided to take the train into NYC today to see the new Rodin exhibit at the Met. But I hit a couple of snags with that. (This post probably won’t be interesting to too many people, but it was interesting enough to me that I thought I’d write it all down. Feel free to skip it if you don’t want to read a narrative of “my day in New York”.)

The trip in was not smooth. First, there was track work between Union and Newark, so we all had to get off the train in Union and switch to a bus. I made the best of that by enjoying the scenic drive through Union. We went down Morris Ave, and passed the building where I used to work, a long time ago. The building is still there, surprisingly. And the Mark Twain Diner is still there too, where I ate many cheeseburgers in my youth! (I hadn’t been through Union in a long time, so that was actually fun.)

Then, in Newark, there were no trains running to NY Penn, due to a switching problem. So I took the PATH to WTC. I hadn’t been to the WTC since they opened the Oculus, and had been meaning to take a trip in to check it out, so this was a good excuse to do that. It’s pretty cool; I should try to get in again and spend some more time exploring it.

From there, I took the 4 train up to 86th and walked the rest of the way to the Met. (Of course, the 4 train got held at the Grand Central stop for 15 minutes for no discernible reason.) I didn’t make it to the Met until about 11:30, so the total delay came to just over an hour.

The Rodin exhibit was pretty cool, though maybe not worth a three hour trip, in and of itself. From there, I walked down to the Met Breuer, to see the Delirious exhibit.

On the walk down, I listened to the John Luther Adams Soundwalk 9:09 piece that he wrote for the opening of the Breuer last year. I’d been meaning to listen to that on the walk from the main Met to the Breuer, since the Breuer first opened, but I never got around to it until now. It’s definitely an interesting experience. (I listened to the “downtown” piece today. Now I need to take the walk in the opposite direction, and listen to the “uptown” piece.)

From the Breuer, I was initially planning on going down to MoMA. There’s not much going on there right now, but I figured it was a good spot to grab lunch and maybe sit outside in the sculpture garden for a bit. I didn’t want to walk all the way down, so I hopped on the M4 bus. When we got near MoMA, though, there was a big police presence for some reason, and a lot of barricades up, so I decided I didn’t need to deal with that and stayed on the bus.

I got off the bus in front of the NY Public Library on 42nd St, and decided to pop in. It’s only open from 1 to 5pm on Sunday, and it was around 2pm when I got there, so my timing was pretty good. I’ve never been in that “main branch” building before, and I’ve always meant to check it out, so I did. It’s a really cool building, and there’s some nifty stuff in there. I wish I’d come on a day when the gift shop had been open though. I saw a few things through the window there that looked cool.

The trip back home from there was relatively uneventful. I walked from the NYPL back to Penn Station with a brief stop at Midtown Comics.

The trains between NY Penn and Newark were running on-time again, so that was OK. I had to do the bus from Newark to Union, but it wasn’t a big inconvenience. Overall, I got home a bit later than I’d intended to, but still reasonably early.

So, as trips go, it didn’t go quite as planned, but I got to do some interesting stuff that I’d been meaning to do, and had a pretty good time.

I went into NYC today and took a handful of random photos. I decided to do something I haven’t done in a while: upload them to Flickr and create an album.

I hit a number of snags with this. First, I discovered that, when you edit photos in iOS, the original photo rather than the edited one gets copied to the Photos app on the Mac when you sync. That’s apparently the expected behavior now, and is described in a support note from Apple. I’d taken and edited the photos with Camera+, but I was planning on uploading them to Flickr from my Mac. But I guess I can’t do that, since I don’t have the edited photos.

So I tried uploading them to Flickr from the phone. I first tried that from the photos app on the phone. I thought that didn’t work, so I tried again, from the Flickr app itself. Well, I guess it worked both times, since I would up with two copies of each photo in Flickr. I managed to delete the duplicates and create an album, back on my Mac, using the Flickr web site.

So, job done, eventually. Sigh. Technology is getting too complicated for me!

(The photos aren’t anything special, by the way. Just a handful of shots from the Met and MoMA, taken only to amuse myself.)

 

MoMA is in the midst of a fairly major renovation project. The last couple of times I went, things were pretty confusing. A lot of stuff was under construction. Here’s an article from the NY Times, from June, with some detail. I know that the entire project won’t be done until 2019, but I’m hoping that, the next time I go, things will be a little more stable.

I have a few complaints about the current status of the museum, but they’re mostly minor complaints about services and not about art. For instance, I think there’s still supposed to be a members coat check, but I have no idea where it is. And I don’t like the way they’re running the cafe now. It used to be run like a regular sit-down restaurant, but now (at least as of the last time I went), they’re running it like a hybrid cafeteria/restaurant. You order and pay for your food first, at a counter, then sit down, and they bring it to you. Not a big deal, but it makes it just a little less relaxing, and a little harder to deal with, if you decide you want an espresso and tiramisu after you’re finished with your meal. (Yeah, I know, first world problems.)

I do like the fact that the extra space will help them show more art from minority and female artists. At the same time, I hope they don’t relegate some of my favorite “white guy” art to the basement or something. I know that Starry Night isn’t going anywhere, but I am a little worried about OOF. (Yeah, I know it’s weird, but I like looking at it. In fact, I’m using it for the wallpaper on my Mac right now.)