A few weeks ago my husband and I went to New York for his birthday. Amongst our many New York adventures we went to visit the Museum of Modern Art, because of course we did. There was a huge line around the museum when we got there to even get inside to purchase tickets, which should have been our first tipoff that this was going to be packed to the gills - still we persisted. Found an elevator up tot he firth floor to do our customary wrk from top to bottom, and in almost the first gallery were met with this:
I didn’t even realize that Starry Night was at this museum.
What this photo doesn’t show, can’t show, is the depth of this crowd - filling half the room in a torso to torso squash to take a photo of Starry Night, when we have Starry Night photos at home. Meanwhile people are bumping into Cezanne’s on their journey in and out of the crowd.
I didn’t even try elbowing my way through it to get a real life peak, it felt like the experience would be ruined by the echoing voices and press of bodies. The rest of the visit wasn’t too dissimiliar - with about 25% of the observable visitors actually looking at things. This all comes off as very judgey, as if I wasn’t also taking pictures; but it was emotionally ahrd to be in a space containing all of what it contains, and not being able to really enjoy it while watching most everyone else also not enjoy it - either because of the crowd or because they appeared to be there to check off an item on a bucket list of things to visit in New York. “See, here’s my video of this famous painting to prove I was there,” while I sit back and wonder if you’d even be there if you couldn’t tell anyone about it.
Anyhow…. here’s some pieces I really liked and want to dig into the creators of:
Also these, which was after the point when I could be bothered to take photos of things: