Day Seventeen: Museum Mile

Claude Monet

The stretch of fifth avenue which borders central park, intersecting with 84th, 85th, 86th, and etc. streets is home to buildings which house hundreds of billions of dollars of precious art. In the Metropolitan Museum itself, the pieces on show are worth more than my life many times over. It's been made abundantly clear by the location of the Met, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney just a few streets over, in the Upper East Side of Manhattan that these museums are prestigious and costly to upkeep. Even the street vendors in the area charge more than their counterparts in the East Village, around the Parson's campus. My experience at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum this morning did not wholly live up to my expectations. After our previous class field trips to the Met and the MoMA, I expected to be blown away by the size, skill, and detail of the museum. Though the pieces on show were beautiful, and more than several pastel drawings and oil paintings intrigued me, I felt that the architecture of the building, heavily touted as one-of-a-kind and breathtaking, to be claustrophobic and dark. Perhaps this was the fault of a current show, which featured the spiral center of the building bathed in changing colored light. Unfortunately, this "exhibit" triggered the removal of many works off the walls of the spiral walkway, and a result, visitors missed out on a lot of art. I appreciate the effort of the Guggenheim with providing an artistic and cultural learning environment for tourists, but I think that the high student-ticket price of $12 in combination with the lack of intrigue ranks it much lower in my esteem than it's neighbors on Museum Mile.

On a happier note, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, though even grander, larger, and featuring more shows than the Guggenheim, has only "suggested fees". Each of my classmates and I paid a dollar to get in. Paul led us around the 19th and 20th century painters, and introduced us to the ages of expressionism, cubism, modernism, and post-modernism. We viewed the masterpieces of Dega, Picasso, and Monet. Upon straying our attention into more modern contemporary art, I was struck by the large masterpieces created by Chuck Close. His color blocked portraits, which incorporated tones of green into skin, used a power of the human eye called "optical mixing". When standing some ten feet away, I saw a face. However, upon closer inspection, I saw that the painting was composed of thousands of small squares, each with concentric blobs of different colors. Close was able to use his knowledge of color theory to combine colors in such a way that, from far away, he could depict a human face. Another piece that caught my eye was a series of ten or twelve canvases, taller and wider than myself, each painted a different hue by Ellsworth Kelly. To the average pedestrian scanning past the artwork, it might have simply looked like a glorified rainbow, amplified to an enormous size. However, since suffering through the gray scale and color wheel exercises in my morning drawing class, I sympathize with the difficulties that artist must have gone through in mixing his paints, for each of the hues was of the exact same value. The yellow panel was the most saturated, as yellow has the lightest intrinsic value and thus was the most true to its hue. By comparison, the purple became heavily tinted, more like a lilac. The actual painting of the canvas must have been a piece of cake compared to the many hours spent preparing the copious amounds of same-value, different-hue paints that comprised the piece.

I love museum mile.