Brent in NYC
Christian and I headed into NYC today to meet up with my college roommate Brent, who was in town on vacation with his new girlfriend Sook. We had a tasty lunch at a sushi restaurant near Grand Central that Christian and I had once tried before and enjoyed. Once again, we were the only ones in there for more than half our meal, which is weird since the fish there is really quite good.
Then we took the subway up to the Whitney Museum and took in some American art. I think I've actually been to the Whitney maybe only once before or even not at all. I guess I'm just not a fan of much American art. We started at the top floor and worked our way down. The top floor turned out to be the best, with the Calder, the O'Keeffe, the Cadmus (so hot), the Hopper, and other lesser but still good artists. The floor below was devoted to Richard Artschwager, who had some cool acrylic prints on this textured material (Cryolex or something?) that were stunningly lifeless in their greyscale, yet embodied this limbo halfway between a dotmatrix newspaper photo and pointillism. That was about half his floor, but the other half was devoted to the "blp", a shape he "invented" (it looks like an oval, but really is just two semicircles connected by straight lines, like the pill shape in a typical game of Set).
The floor below that was "Sinister Pop", i.e. pop art with dun dun dun... a dark side. So there was an Andy Warhol of nine differently colored portraits of... an electric chair. Or a Jasper Johns painting of an American flag colored GREEN. Gasp. It was kind of lame and the only pieces that made an impression were the ones by relative unknowns. On a wing connected to that, they had a crowded video installation titled "Pop in TV and the Movies", which was utterly uninspiring. They had Scorpio Rising, the most famous piece by Kenneth Anger. And Hold Me While I'm Naked, the most famous piece by George Kuchar. And a lame (no surprise there) movie by Andy Warhol. It was just a very obvious selection of avant-garde pieces that had no real thematic connection and were played in such a way that the audio on all of them was hard to follow. The one upside is that I got to see David Lynch's The Alphabet, which was a semi-freaky depiction of a young bedridden girl (Lynch's daughter) reciting the alphabet and the letters taking on a life of their own. You can see Lynch's craft, but it's not all that interesting beyond that. 6/10.
Then we took the subway up to the Whitney Museum and took in some American art. I think I've actually been to the Whitney maybe only once before or even not at all. I guess I'm just not a fan of much American art. We started at the top floor and worked our way down. The top floor turned out to be the best, with the Calder, the O'Keeffe, the Cadmus (so hot), the Hopper, and other lesser but still good artists. The floor below was devoted to Richard Artschwager, who had some cool acrylic prints on this textured material (Cryolex or something?) that were stunningly lifeless in their greyscale, yet embodied this limbo halfway between a dotmatrix newspaper photo and pointillism. That was about half his floor, but the other half was devoted to the "blp", a shape he "invented" (it looks like an oval, but really is just two semicircles connected by straight lines, like the pill shape in a typical game of Set).
The floor below that was "Sinister Pop", i.e. pop art with dun dun dun... a dark side. So there was an Andy Warhol of nine differently colored portraits of... an electric chair. Or a Jasper Johns painting of an American flag colored GREEN. Gasp. It was kind of lame and the only pieces that made an impression were the ones by relative unknowns. On a wing connected to that, they had a crowded video installation titled "Pop in TV and the Movies", which was utterly uninspiring. They had Scorpio Rising, the most famous piece by Kenneth Anger. And Hold Me While I'm Naked, the most famous piece by George Kuchar. And a lame (no surprise there) movie by Andy Warhol. It was just a very obvious selection of avant-garde pieces that had no real thematic connection and were played in such a way that the audio on all of them was hard to follow. The one upside is that I got to see David Lynch's The Alphabet, which was a semi-freaky depiction of a young bedridden girl (Lynch's daughter) reciting the alphabet and the letters taking on a life of their own. You can see Lynch's craft, but it's not all that interesting beyond that. 6/10.