Artiste

Aki, Booger & I went to the MoMA yesterday. On the up side, we got free admission courtesy of Peter's corporate membership (he wasn't actually able to join us). On the down side, we met up so late that we only had 45 minutes in the galleries. MoMA turned out to be smaller than I'd remembered, so we were still able to see everything in the museum's main painting & sculpture collection. Saw quite a bit of Van Gogh (including Starry Night), Picasso (including Demoiselles de Avignon), Matisse, Miro, Rothko, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Mondrian, and work by many other artists I'd studied in my intro to art history class in college.

Booger pointed out one memorable piece by Ad Reinhardt (Abstract Painting) that, upon first viewing, simply looked like a square canvas painted black. The longer you looked at it, though, the better able you were to distinguish the 9 smaller squares that made up the larger canvas, arranged like the squares of a tic-tac-toe board. Each square was painted a shade of black that was ever so slightly different from the one next to it. Hard to describe except to say that it was like an optical illusion. You'd probably have to stand in front of it yourself to get the full effect.

Getting up close & personal w/the art proved to be no problem, which was really great. (I think that was the idea behind the Modern - making art accessible to the masses). People were taking pictures in front of the paintings and going so close that their noses were inches from the canvas. Of course there were the requisite guards posted all around the gallery, but they were really laid back compared to the ones at, say, the Met.

After the MoMA closed, we went across 53rd street to the MoMA design store. They have some really cool stuff there - a lot of it inspired & made in Japan. One display was dedicated to "safe" products, designed to raise awareness of safety or something. Besides various locks and pick-pocket-proof bags, there was a sort-of bulletproof T-shirt - a regular black cotton T-shirt with tiny metal plates integrated into the chest area to protect your heart from damaging blows, or something. It was $99. There was a ring that could be folded out and worn as brass knuckles for self defense. There was even a "banana case" to protect your banana from getting bruised in your bag.

We took a really crazy loop to get to Rockefeller Center, since the whole area was packed with tourists and we weren't exactly sure where we were going. This was our approximate route, and it just goes to show we are lost w/o GeioseeFroggie as our OnStar system in the city:

We rounded out the evening w/dinner at Hanbat in K-town and dessert at some Korean bakery by the subway station that required us to order 2 drinks before we could sit "on" the table. But all in all, it was a good time & great to catch up w/an old friend.