After reading Pete Hamill's "Downtown," a badass memoir-slash-history of living and working in Lower Manhattan during the last 300 years, and after living here for almost three years (and never even having seen the Statue of Liberty from a distance), I figure it's about time to strap on a fanny pack and capri pants and check out the places that obese families from Arkansas wearing all-white New Balances and faux-hawked Euros ask me how to get to while I try to mind my own business on the subway. Also, I have a lot of free time and the eye candy is getting splendid (thank Buddha that Ugg season is over!), and besides, it never hurts to get a lil art & culture up in yo life (in addition to the fact that my Columbia ID that gets me in to every museum for free expires when I graduate in May).
First stop on the tour - the Metropolitan Museum of Art - which I checked out last Wednesday, was the shortest, because it's the only place on the list that I've already been to several times, and one with which most people are familiar. I'll dispense with the descriptions of the massive columned exterior, the huge glass pyramid looking out into Central Park, the guilded, turn-of-the-century mansions across the street, and the Asian man in the Scooby Doo tee shirt who asked me to take a picture of him next to a hot dog cart with his 100000000-megapixel Asian camera. Although he was pretty cool. Instead, some random thoughts:
- Greek bodies drawn on urns and vases look remarkably similar to today's cartoons, except there are many more penises on them. Greeks love penis, I guess.
- Has the act of creation become undervalued? In antiquity, even the most simple items like hairbrushes were painstakingly handcrafted to become works of art, to say nothing of the ornate statues, paintings, tunics, and wall hangings that are ubiquitous in their intricacy. What has mass production and a consumer ethos done to our conception of beauty and what should be beautiful? Does anyone care?
- Has our easy access to cheap, plastic, throw-away goods destroyed a part of the skill set that defines us as human? Is digital art just as beautiful, the next logical cultural step, or is it just a product of postmodern laziness, pressing a button to let a machine do the real creative work?
- I need to learn all the romance languages in order to spit game to the FOOOIINNNE ass European girls giggling at the African fertility sculpture. Need to find what country they're from and move there ASAP.
- Symbolism and myth have been been so integral to every culture for at least 50,000 years, from the French cave paintings to English Romanticism. What are our symbols? Has our scientific, realist-centric society destroyed the validity of myth in the overall human conscious? What has this done/will this do to our collective psyche?
- There was definitely a huge bong masquerading as a vase in the modern furniture exhibit, designed by Dale Chihuly. I would like to chill with him.
- 50% of all government funding should go to time travel research, as that would be the coolest technology EVER. I want to see how creepy the Greeks really were. Not to mention dinosaurs.
