Well, Chris has been doing a fantastic job of talking about our trip on his side of this website. He was a lot more diligent about taking time to do things online, whereas I barely got on the computer the whole trip... I was usually too tired once I had the opportunity, and was much more concerned with showering and sleeping.
So what I will add to Chris's accounts are a lot of extra little tidbits. Like my pedometer tells me that we walked, on average, 10 miles a day. I typically (if I'm lucky) manage to walk about 3 miles a day, and the recommended is 5 miles a day. So this was a lot more walking than we were used to... my feet and legs were killing me all the time, but we never wanted to stop because there was so much we wanted to see each day. We went to every museum we wanted to go to, plus PS1 (a division of the MOMA, which was awesome) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art that weren't on our planned list. We also went to every gallery we knew we wanted to see, plus a bunch that we just wandered into that had some awesome stuff (like a Nan Goldin exhibit, and one with some Matthew Barney prints). And we saw so much artwork that I started to get sick of artwork.
Really, I enjoyed everywhere we went. But I am more interested in modern art than I am in the older stuff... basically, I care most about anything from Dada onward than from anything before, and I have the most knowledge of art from Dada onward. And I love Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art... really, I LOVE this stuff... but I got really tired of art museums that seem to think that people stopped creating art after Pop Art. It got to the point that by the 4th or 5th museum, when I rounded a corner and saw another room full of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and Barnet Newman, I would inwardly groan. I really got tired of seeing the same stuff... I wanted something newer! Give me some Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, or George Segal! I know you own some of their stuff! So where is it? And those are three artists we never saw work from... very disappointing. We did see a few things from Joseph Beuys, Rachel Whiteread, and Chuck Close. But overall, the post-pop-art representation was scarce. Very disappointing to me.
I ended up enjoying the small galleries more than the large museums in a lot of ways, because it was newer work, even though most the time it was people I'd never heard of and would probably never hear of again.
I must say that I was very pleased with the amount of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Marcel Duchamp work that we saw, though. Their work never gets tiring to me... the Rauchenberg Combines show at The Met was amazing... and I was well pleased with the Jasper Johns room at the Philly Museum, not to mention the Duchamp room there.
Our RUF pastor has said on multiple occasions that he things beauty, and therefore art, is objective, and that Marcel Duchamp's work is not beautiful and is therefore not art. I will have to disagree with that until the day I die, because I think the work he's done is conceptually beautiful and meaningful in ways that a lot of other "beautiful" art cannot be.
Although I will say that the more I run into Monet's work, the more it grows on me.
Anyways, this has turned into a long rambling art post... I'll talk more about the trip later... next episode will most likely be raving about the food in NYC... and there's a lot to rave about!
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