Art, art and more art

May 6, 2010

When I got here I had an idea of some of the galleries I wanted to visit. Like any tourist The Met, Guggenheim and MoMA featured prominently on my list, but since being here I think that I’ve been to more galleries than I knew existed offering extraordinary visual encounters (and some not so). Seeing so much gave me an overall sense of benevolence – artists take something that has been percolating from within, transplant it to the outside, relieving themselves and offering it to the world.

I joined us up to MoMA which was a perversely thrilling transaction but it made sense to do so as there are a few exhibitions on there that can’t be done justice in a day – William Kentridge (amazing – lost a couple of hours, gained new perspectives), Tim Burton (the crowds loved it, I was claustrophobic, can’t imagine what he and Helena’s houses look like), Cartier Bresson and oh so much more. At MoMA the people – and outfit – watching is sometimes as good as the art itself. I also loved feeling like I had somewhere to go when I had a spare hour during the day and it began to feel like a rather large, densely populated second home.

We went over to Prospect Park in Brooklyn last Saturday for breakfast with some friends who are artists. They put us onto Brooklyn Museum, which has an enormous collection of work, my favourite being an exhibition by Kiki Smith that shimmered. At the New Museum on Bowery I felt like I was walking inside a cake tin and two special things happened at an exhibition curated by Jeff Koons: I walked into one room and joined a wax corpse of JFK – just me, John and the security guard (who, it turned out, was a trumpeter). In another was shocked by nine white fibre glass corpses laid out. Rather than have a written explanation accompanying the work, a soprano in her sixties sang the artist and the work’s name. Her voice filled the room and it was incredibly moving.

One day we met a guy who told us he used to run the cafe at the Guggenheim and that we should try and get our roller-skates past security and whoosh down the Lloyd Wright helter-skelter. One, we don’t have skates and two, it struck me as disrespectful, but apparently at least one person gets away with it a week. So we settled for a tour for two, sans wheels.

My favourite moment in all the gallery adventures? T hoping for a rest – ‘oh, there’s nothing much around there Lise, just some Monets and Manets’. Oh-we’re- so- spoiled.