The art of watching
I slammed MoMA after their latest expansion, largely because they shut down the museum for two years, while spending close to one billion dollars (that shock-and-awe figure must have included the cost of the real estate), and upon reopening, jacking up their admission price 75%, from $12 to $20.
But the more I visit the museum the more I totally love what the architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, has done with the problematic urban space. The Japanese architect specializes in museums, and it helped that I got to visit a couple of them when I was in Japan a few years back, and got a better idea for his design aesthetics (for instance, his “signature colors” are, perversely, white and clear). His museums in Japan are much more impressive, since they incorporate the building into the site/landscape, with nature, gardens, plazas, and pools. Here in NYC, he was mostly arranging the galleries in a 3-D Tetris-like assemblage within an irregular chunk of a block in midtown, surrounded and hemmed in by other buildings.
But what he’s done within these restrictions is amazing. The galleries provide all sorts of vantage points for viewing not just the art, but other parts of the museums, and other people viewing art. From the top sixth floor you can face a vertigo-inducing white wall, and a waist-high glass barrier over a shaft where you can peer down and see every other floor in the museum, all the way down to the busy ticket counters in the main floor lobby. From the large introductory gallery on the second floor, expanses of ottomans allow you to lay back and view all the way up to the vaulted ceilings which provide some natural light into the core of the buildings. And in the dense pack of permanent collection galleries of the 4th and 5th floors, suddenly there are windowed alcoves that allow you to peer out and see the surrounding architecture of the neighborhood and of midtown, from classic and sleek skyscrapers to the shabby and eccentric old brownstones facing across the street.
I have to thank in large part two recent visitors who I got to share one of NYC’s treasures with: BJ/caestus, standing in front of 2/3 of one of their most famous pieces in their collection, Monet’s Water Lilies, and Patrick/mudcub, with whom I feasted on Mediterranean food in their café before feasting on their art.
