About a week ago, I swung down to Manhattan to see the Bauhaus show at the MoMA before it closes (tomorrow, January 25, is the last day!). On a Friday afternoon, even before the 4 pm “free entry courtesy of Target” crowd rushed in, the place was almost as packed as the sidewalks in Times Square. Tickets for the Tim Burton show had all been given away by mid-morning, so my $20 ticket did not get me into that (though the people who showed up shortly after 4 pm and paid $0 got timed tickets). There were more people standing in front of most paintings in the museum than had been on the Friday afternoon flight from Boston to LaGuardia (150,000 lb. jet). The Monet Water Lilies were gathered together in a room for contemplation. About 200 art lovers were chatting and cell phoning in the room, giving it a high school basketball game ambiance. Here’s a video that I made with a first-generation Android phone: youtube.
The Bauhaus show had some lovely colorful stuff. It was interesting to see how craft-y a lot of the stuff was. In particular, they did a lot of wall hangings that were custom-designed and then handwoven. It would be nice if there were a consumer-priced Web service that would allow you to design a tapestry and then have a computer-controlled loom weave it.
The adjacent Gabriel Orozco show features a stunning slimmed-down Citroen (photos; my Android video).
MoMA is so crowded that it is unclear that the art can be viewed as intended. A rock show is designed to be experienced by 10,000 people and, in fact, probably would not work without the people present. A movie is designed for 500 people to see simultaneously and sized accordingly. Most of the stuff in MoMA was intended to be quietly contemplated in a rich person’s house. Are Monet’s Water Lilies still the same work when consumed in a noisier environment than Grand Central Station? As the population of the planet expands, perhaps there is a need for artists to create work that improves when it shares a room with hundreds of people chattering away on mobile phones.
After the MoMA, my hosts took me to dinner at Anthos, a nearby Greek restaurant. Some of the food was excellent, but the $100/person price tag (we had one bottle of wine, almost the cheapest on the list, and split a single dessert) was more memorable than the meal. My local friends did not blink at the prices, though neither of them is TARP-funded.
At breakfast the next morning, a 6-year-old boy at the table demanded that his father cut up the pancakes for him. I expressed shock that a 6-year-old kid couldn’t cut his own pancake. Even a 2-month-old puppy could manage to eat a pancake unassisted. My contribution to the meal was an entire package of bacon, baked for 10 minutes at 400 degrees just as suggested on the back of the label. The young boy tasted one strip and, without malice, stated simply that “this is the worst bacon that I’ve had in my entire life.”
Back at LaGuardia, there were literally more TSA agents than passengers in the terminal. Our flight to Boston had 10 seats occupied on a plane that holds 76. The Obama Economic Miracle has yet to reach the airlines…
Have you looked at TreasureKnit?
http://www.treasureknit.com/tapestry/tapestry.aspx
I haven’t used them myself so I can’t vouch from personal experience, but it looks like what you want.
It’s encouraging that New York has so many people passionate for the arts. All too often, people give the theater scene and museums as one reason why they live there, even if they seldom if ever actually set foot in one.
The Bauhaus photographer László Moholy-Nagy could be said to be the father of digital photography. He took a painting, overlaid it with graph paper, and telephoned to a tile factory the colors values for the various pixels, and the enameled tiles were reassembled to form the paintings, after a fashion.
My kids used to demand (with a grin) that I cut up their pancakes for them, long past the age of six. They were perfectly able to do for themselves. It had nothing to do with dependence, and everything to do with affection. Bit of a ritual – with me, not their mother (compared to which, all three are better cooks).
Whether any of this applies to the kid you saw, I have no idea. But you do need to check past the surface – the first impression could be misleading.
Note all my kids learned the pragmatics of cooking – and to fend for themselves – by their teens. My oldest son (in the Marines) came through today, cooked up and devoured a mess of bacon, eggs, and sausage (wish I still had his metabolism) – without any need for help. My youngest is still learning, but sufficiently confident in the kitchen.
… and bacon is tricky. Following directions is not a guarantee. 🙂
Then again, this could be a spoiled kid of indulgent rich parents, as would seem to be your first impression.
May I cross reference other two blogs recently dealing-quite surprisingly-with the same topic?
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/638.html
and
http://wbmh.blogspot.com/2010/01/miro-miro-on-wall-what-is-funniest.html
For the laziest, I cite, in short:
“why [do] thousands of people go to the Louvre to see the original of the Mona Lisa, behind thick protective glass from a distance of several meters, instead of getting a much better view of the picture by looking at a good reproduction.”
“There were more people standing in front of most paintings in the museum…”
… reminds me of visiting a big Picasso exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with my seven-year-old son, who was an emerging artist and enjoyed debate. We persevered in the packed crowd until finally we were wedged against velvet ropes too close to some massive unprimed canvases criss-crossed with broad, black brush strokes. After a few beats Richard said incredulously, “This?!! is Picasso?!!” Snickers and snorts broke out around us. I didn’t feel like launching into it on the hoof amid a captive audience and I told him, “This is one of Picasso’s many different modes of painting. Please try to be as observant as you can while we are here and we will discuss it all later.” He accepted direction with a parting shot: “Well — he must have painted them when he was very young.”
That six-year-old’s assessment of your breakfast bacon does sound like an artfully indirect return shot following upon your pancake shock. His instinctive invocation of authority and closure with “my entire life,” reminds me of our young debater citing the Encyclopedia Britannica to validate his points – before he could even read. ☺