beetrock

To my incredible shame, after four years in New York, I had not been to MOMA until this past Saturday. Previously, I have compensated for this with frequenting the MOMA design store. Anyone who says that shopping is incomparable to art is wrong. The range of emotions that you experience partaking in the latter is, of course, far superior. But what about the lull of possession? The desire to consume? The anxious tremor of the machine as it prints a receipt with an imprint of yet another useless possession? Or useful? Who says that shoes are less valuable than feelings? Not if they are on sale! Thanks to the pair I was wearing, the impaired escalator to the sixth special exhibits floor was a breeze.

The Munch show was special indeed, particularly the lithographs and woodcuts that look almost live with emotion. “The Scream” is extremely overrated, in my opinion, compared to some of the other presented work. What almost made me scream in terror, however, was not the portrayal of pain and suffering by the Norwegian genius, but the balcony that housed the entrance to the exhibit. Whoever thought that it was a good idea to separate the balcony from the ground floor of the museum six stories below with a thin, three-foot tall glass barrier was a champion in natural selection. The architects put short people, children and those afraid of heights at immediate disadvantage, and possibly meant for these visitors to view the cross section of the museum in flight. The whiteness of the wall and the black tiles of the floor below made my head spin and, actually, had the same effect from below.

The rest of MOMA was free of danger zones and full of gaze-worthy art. My favorite part was the outside garden with a constructed pond and a “she-goat” sculpture by Picasso. Bleat with me here, art lovers.