Museums in NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET)

Art museums: they are aplenty. They’re all world-famous; even people not connected with the art world have heard about the MET, the MOMA, Guggenheim… Some others know about the Whitney Museum of American Art. As everything NY, the museums are supposed to be impressive: in their size, in the size of their collections, in the quality of the curated shows.

Those of you who’ve read my previous post on NY will not be surprised that I was not impressed with its museums, either. I grew up looking at pictures of artworks from the MET; I went to college (in RO) looking at slide shows of pictures of artworks from the MET. I would only slightly overstate the point if I were to say that I’ve always wanted to see the MET! And to the MET we went: about 5 times in a month, if we’re including the visit to the MET Cloisters. Here’s my frank opinion: I remember no particular artwork from the MET. I do remember its size, I do remember the quality of the light, in most of its rooms: natural light bathing everything in its glow. I believe I’ve seen some pyramids, some mummies, some Ancient Greek ceramics. Nothing remarkable; nothing that I haven’t seen before. This is mean: of course I wasn’t impressed now, 13 years later. Would I have been impressed, had I visited the MET in 2003, art history degree in hand, fresh out of Bucharest? I’m not sure. The MET seems to live by Raymond Chandler’s dictum: it is “the department store” museum that has “the most of everything and the best of nothing” (The Little Sister, 1949).

The irony doesn’t escape me. Chandler talked like that about the state of California and, in particular, about Los Angeles. Call me a different kind of “snob”, if you like, but amassing millions of exhibits (as it seemed to me the MET did) and cramming them all, categorized by historical period, and, sometimes, by geographical region, is the surest way to kill the art! Dead and buried… the tomb is of a very sophisticated nature: but it’s sucking the life out of even the Modiglianis and the Rothkos! I have no real expectation for a mummy to speak to me, but Rothko is my guy and in the MET he was dead silent.

rothko_met
No. 3 — Mark Rothko (1953), oil on canvas, on display at the MET, Gallery 921

The usual depthlessness that embraces Rothko’s viewers was missing. The picture, in its solitude, doesn’t foreground that absence well. If I could’ve isolated this painting in my visits, just like here, and let myself be imbibed with the strength of character given off by the contrast between the red and the pink, I could maybe have entered the conversation. But, given its place in the display, I almost passed it by, without even noticing it. Poor Rothko, almost lost to the dust of memory!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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