Category Archives: Museums

Its not that I don’t get it…

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[podcast]http://nacreo.us/Nacreous/Media/Breathe.mp3[/podcast]

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There was a great gaggle of noisy coming out of my entourage this weekend, specifically about the collective need for them to visit the MOMA and see the Marina Abramovic installation The Artist is Present. I warned them that there is to be no fondling the performers, and absolutely no mimicking her. So we went.

I turned on my super-artist sensitivity and absorbed the entire installation; at times I was not even looking at one thing in particular, rather just feeling the emotions which were inspired by the cacophonous environment of competing multimedia pieces occupying vast amounts of gallery space. The pacing and deliberation of all the works, such as the metronome in the Installation for a Artist to Live in, the rhythm of quiet-quiet-explosviely loud in the folk dance and the works with Ulay in which simple movements and standing were mixed together all screamed for seriousness. It is in the shrugging off of any aesthetic which has a scrap of entertainment and forces one to completely dive into the mental, cerebral and conceptual aspects of “serious art”.

Serious Art is something that I think is created by small French children chain smoking Gauloises and questioning the existential meaning of the monkey bars.

What happened to me while I was experiencing all this morbid fascination with the mundane; I got depressed.

I got depressed because I get depressed easily. I got depressed because I recollected experiences from earlier in this decade when I existed in circles of people who did this sort of performance art regularly. I got depressed because one of those people was an X, who idolized/hero worshipped or at least took great inspiration from Marina Abramovic. I got depressed because the works were good enough to touch that depression button, tearing down any bit of my mind that thought that life was worth living and blanking out any affirming messages that might prohibit my depression from spreading further. Rather than continue to subject myself to the perceived nihilistic onslaught, I went to get something to eat.

When my entourage caught up with me, all were excited about discussing this installation. If any of you out there have seen the retrospective of this work, I’d love to have your opinions added to the fray. Please leave a comment below.

A visit to The Met

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This marble statue of St. Emo the Drama Queen resides in the sculpture garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As far as large scale institutions which house, collect artifacts which were created by poor inspired and perhaps starving artisans across the ages (who knows maybe there are a number of creators in the collection who were rich and well-fed) the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of my favorites. Perhaps my personal all-time favorite but that could just be the result of familiarity, I mean, I am not really very familiar with the collections at the Louvre or the Museum of London, or any of the other ‘World-Class’ places.

Note to self: Do become more familiar with large institutional collections of Art as they have been gathered about the globe in a convenient pattern for the sake of tourism.

Anyways, I went last Friday as part of a soulful return to NYC. Its sort of my spiritual home in the city, if you will. See, when I first moved to New York City, I was a young, misguided brat who had his head half out of this world and my thinking found me climbing the obelisk that is parked at the top the hill, directly behind the Museum. During this act, I was in a spiritual trance or high on some substance, I can’t remember which, but before the aliens came down and visited me, I found on one of the corners of the base of Cleopatra’s Needle a shiny black stone. At the time it seemed very, very important and highly mystical.

Of course, I was completely alone at this time, and knew noone in the city, so I was basically praying to be able to meet people, make friends and find my way around the place. So for what its worth, you can say that those prayers were answered, especially as I have been to a dance party in the Temple of Dendur, but that is officially another story altogether.