The Arts in NYC Fall 2012

I visited the Museum of Modern Art Monday afternoon on the 17th of September.

When we discussed modern and abstract art in class for the past 2 weeks, I thought I understood why people made abstract art. When I walked out of the MoMA and thought about what I saw, I realized that I really didn’t understand anything.I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy the museum at all; I did, but the trip definitely wasn’t as fulfilling as I had expected it to be.

It was my first time visiting the museum and I had no idea where to start looking. I probably should have done some research before hand but I was lazy. Maybe if i had done some background checks on the exhibits, I would have felt more comfortable there. Anyway, I flipped through the floor guide and Found the suggested route for Long visits which started from the top floor, the sixth, and went down through the different floors.

I decided to start from the fifth floor in the Paintings and sculptures exhibit. It was interesting to see all the different paintings at first because they were mostly brightly colored and had strange patterns that just catch your eye. There was one particularly eye catching painting hidden at the back of the exhibit with no description. I was first attracted to it because it seemed like a painting of a unicorn. It was really surreal and mystical and in a way reminded me of the song “Lucy in the sky with Diamonds” by The Beatles because of it’s vibrant colors and also because It felt like the painting was produced through a hallucination. This isn’t to say that I think it’s stupid but, because it was so different, I was taken aback by it. I tried to make sense of what I saw but I couldn’t really see past the sheep (my final conclusion about the identity of the animal), the green man, and the tiny farmer.

While I was walking around the Paintings exhibit I found myself more attracted to the paintings with more familiar objects. For example, there was one painting that showed A lamp-lit street in the dark with a bright blue background showing that it was daytime. This Painting piqued my interest because it made me wonder about why the artist wanted to contrast the two scenes. It is hard to tell in the picture i took, but there was also a great deal of detail and precision in the painting that I liked. It would seem boring to look at this painting after seen all of the different “weird” paintings, but it wasn’t and I actually enjoyed looking at this one.

After finishing the 5th floor, I headed down to the 4th floor where they had a second section for paintings and sculptures. While looking through this gallery, I noticed that I was again more attracted to the paintings that were more familiar to me, but which were expressed in different forms. I especially enjoyed the Cubist style because the objects were easily identifiable but were painted in such a way that they weren’t so direct and conventional. Some of these paintings were made by Picasso. Contrary to other people’s belief that it is something sad that people overlook lesser known works because they are only attracted to the big name artists, I don’t think that this is necessarily true. People may not be attracted to works because of the artist that painted them, instead they might have been attracted to the artist because of the painting. For me, I didn’t realize that many of the paintings i enjoyed were made by well known artists until  went and looked at the descriptions.

As I made my way further downwards, I visited the Quay Brothers film exhibit and also a section on photography. These were interesting to me because I liked the animation aspect about their work. Their animation was horror filled because of the objects and themes they used, but the way the animations looked were very interesting and the works were in motion so I was more focused on them. The photography exhibit was interesting because they reminded me a lot of what we can do with Photobooth on Apple computers especially in the distorted pictures.

This one was interesting because I was amazed that people could actually produce pictures like this through more conventional photography and development.

Now you may be wondering why, when I obviously enjoyed so many things, my trip wasn’t as fulfilling as I expected. This is because I went in expecting to enjoy everything and to appreciate the talent that I saw but unfortunately I didn’t. I was interested but when I walked out of the Museum I didn’t feel changed nor did I have the feeling that I wanted to go back. Modern art is still hard for me to comprehend. Maybe this is just because I’m still familiarizing myself with it or maybe I might never get it. The MoMA was a nice experience but I am still unchanged.