MoMA... with the cute mouse ears

Why do Americans suck so bad about contemporary art? I am making a sweeping generalization, but that's the nature of blogging so work with me here. I was an eager victim of the realistic=good mindset until I met Kat. She is a painter and, whenever you really fall in love with somebody you start doing a million little things you never thought that you'd do like shower everyday, wear a belt that matches your shoes, become a vegetarian, moderate your self-destructive behavior, and subject yourself to a whole world of social events you'd never considered in the past - like, oh say, contemporary art. I thumbed through Kat's collection of Taschen and Phaidon books and kept my opinions to myself because I loved my new girlfriend and I really liked the sex so I wasn't about to fuck anything up. Then, perhaps sensing my muted skepticism, she pulled a fast one on me. She took me on a tour of museums all over the Midwest. I followed her to exhibits at the Wexner Center, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, and Pittsburgh's bafflingly-cool collection of museums including my favorite, The Mattress Factory. Lo and behold, I slowly began to realize that art didn't fall off a cliff after Monet and Van Gogh. The boring squares of color that I'd scrutinized in a book of Rothko paintings had become shimmering contrasts of color as I stood in front of one and actually spent a couple minutes Looking at it instead of performing that moseying procession I had mastered over years. I learned that egg tempura-realism wasn't necessarily the epitome of painting and that artists like Tim Hawkinson, John Currin, Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon and Hieronymus Bosch could knock me on my ass without photo-realistic renditions.

I know, many of your are thinking (or perhaps saying out loud) - "Duh, Deckard! What are you, a fuckin' idiot? Where have you been living - under a rock?" First of all, nobody calls me a fuckin' idiot to my face. Second, I am living in a cave, which is in a rock, not under it. Third, my artistic medium of choice for the first 25 years of my life has been film. In addition to the photographic aspect, the bulk of filmmaking has been stuck in naturalistic representations of reality. Yeah yeah, I know about El Topo, Un Chien Andalou and tons of other obtuse art films, but please refer to sentence #2 in this blog. I have written my perspective on good vs. bad art, but it is important to note that I actually View contemporary art before I pass judgment. I have come a LONG way in the last 5 years and much of it has had to do with remaining open to the occassional thrashing of my assumptions. On Friday night, my girlfriend and I participated in the backpackers/broke NYer's Event of the City - Free Admission to The Museum of Modern Art. Kat and I have avoided this outing ever since the MoMA's grand opening in their re-designed building. Part of our avoidance was due to the horror stories we'd heard regarding the endless lines and over-stuffing of the museum. I, however, have also endured a dodgy relationship with MoMA. I'd visited the Manhattan museum back in 2000 when they had just begun to renovate their building but were still willing to charge nearly full price to see a pitiful, handful of paintings. 3 years later, I was similarly-bilked when I trudged out to their temporary 'warehouse' museum in Queens for another token showing of a few paintings. Admittedly, my mood wasn't helped when, mid-way through an Ansel Adams exhibit, the City decided to have their first blackout in 30 years, sending me, Kat and a friend of mine on an 11-mile, hiking trek back to Inwood... in flip-flops.

Well, we finally went and the verdict on the new building is in. I congratulate MoMA for building the most banal, non-contemporary piece of architecture they could muster and still keep a straight face when they call themselves 'Modern'. The building is a series of boxy levels with a high, central ceiling and wall windows that drastically shift the color temperature of the rooms from one wall to the next (kind of important from a consistent-lighting standpoint). There are small side hallways that go nowhere but are just long enough to make you have to walk clear over There to find out. From the outside, it looks like virtually any office building built after 1960. For weeks after it opened, the New York publications debated the boldness of the architecture. Let me tell you what's bold about it. Nothing. It's a space built to truck people through it's halls and along it's escalators as quickly and efficiently as possible.

But let's be honest here, bold architecture doesn't necessarily mean art-friendly. The Guggenheim looks fantastic when you walk in and climb the spiraling hall for the first time, but it's not the easiest place to view art with every person in the museum passing in front of you on the way up or down. The real reason I was at MoMA was to check out the paintings, so... If MoMA was my first time seeing a Van Gogh or Jackson Pollack in person, then I might have been somewhat impressed. Peeking between big hair and baseball caps to get a glimpse of "Starry Night" was not exactly an enlightening experience. I couldn't get over the fact that the vast majority of art in MoMA was limited to pieces created prior to 1970. Everything was really safe and had that 'corporate lobby' feel.

Then, it hit me - I was at Snob Disneyland. I was at a hand-carved, wooden 'rollercoaster-ride' of a movie. I was at a Coldplay concert performed with the New York Philharmonic in Lincoln Center. I was watching 'American Idol: Opera Edition'. I was in a museum where I had zero chance of catching 30 seconds in front of a painting without someone having to mosey right the fuck in front of me.

It was a museum for the person that I was 6 years ago, and once I realized this, I let it go.