Sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Often times, when I attend an arts event, such as those part of the Macaulay Seminar, I rarely feel the art for arts purpose. I know that statement doesn’t make any sense, so I’m gonna try and explain. When I am required to attend an arts event, I never seem to enjoy myself. I always feel as if they are a hassle, an annoyance. After many of these events, I started to dislike the arts, which scared me when I came to that realization.

I wanted to figure out whether I truly disliked art, or rather, I disliked being forced to see, hear, or feel art. I truly appreciate art; I have since my senior year of high school, when I was exposed to a lot of it. Therefore, I decided to head down to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, just myself, to decide whether I still had an affinity towards the art world. I decided to go by myself, because I didn’t want any distractions. I didn’t want to discuss pieces of art and try to explain what I saw, because I felt as if the purpose of art is to feel it and enjoy it, not justify that feeling to others.

My favorite section at the Met was the Greek and Roman statues. These statues have always fascinated me; I don’t know why. I liked how they were amazingly realistic, and embodied the power, the gentleness, and wrath, and evil, of man, and woman. All these emotions, carved into stone, made them so relatable, as if I knew these people in my own life. It was an amazing, powerful, an overwhelming feeling. I spent the next hour just walking around and around that section, looking at all the statues, admiring the craftsmanship, the attention to detail, and just the feelings that I created in me.

I then head down to the American sculptures, which were all recreations of historical and mythological figures done by sculptors in the 1800s. Here, I wasn’t as blown away as I once was. Perhaps this was because I felt that these artists were mere copycats, doing something that had already been done before. Their works weren’t as grand or as powerful as the works of old were, at least to me. These newer pieces of work were far to polished, and almost perfect, as opposed to those I had seen before. The ancient Greek works truly depicted the human body, with curves, and muscular tones, and posture, all of which gave them a sense of life; not so with the American ones. There was no realism in them. They looked, essentially fake to me, a terrible attempt at reviving at olden days.

Looking at these two sections for hours on end at day, I felt satisfaction. I had truly enjoyed myself. Studying the human body encased in stone, I felt a sense of….I don’t know, something, that I cannot fully describe, or yet understand. There was power in those works, a power that I never really got from anything else I’ve seen so far. I’m still trying to understand what I saw, and felt when I saw the sculptures. Maybe it was the fact that they were three dimensional pieces, giving them a sense of realness. Perhaps it was the poses each statue struck, or the emotions I felt from each one, that stuck with me. I don’t know.