As a native New Yorker it’s still hard to wrap my head around the fact that we don’t live in New York anymore. I was always one of those people who was never going to leave, who was destined to live and learn and marry and die somewhere between Brooklyn, Queens & Manhattan. Before all this it never really occurred to me that you could leave.
Kyle’s cousins were in town for Five Points Fest and a few days more, so after the show closed we spent a day uptown doing all things touristy. We started at The Plaza which now boasts condos and an impressive food court in the basement. From there we walked into Central Park to visit Belvedere Castle and Alice in Wonderland after forgoing the Zoo because it’s relatively unimpressive to anyone who lives somewhere with a proper zoo. The Bronx Zoo is amazing – The Central Park Zoo is teeny.
And then it was off to The Met.
I went to a little high school in Chelsea called The New York City Museum School where two afternoons a week we went to a museum or cultural institution to learn about everything from Modern Art to how to spot the difference between Doric, Ionian and Corinthian columns. We commuted all over the city in the pursuit of knowledge – from The Brooklyn Museum to The Cloisters – but most often we found ourselves at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it – The Met is one of my favorite places on Earth.
While at the museum we visited Arms and Armor – because there’s just nothing cooler than a bunch of suits of armor and weird weapons.
We saw Van Gogh and Degas and went up to the roof garden.
As a teenager and young adult I never spent much time on the Cantor Roof – but now there’s nothing better than overlooking Central Park and sipping something alcoholic while surrounded by art.
The current exhibition is called The Theater of Disappearance and is described as follows:
Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas has transformed the Cantor Roof with an intricate site-specific installation that uses the Museum itself as its raw material. Featuring detailed replicas of nearly 100 objects from The Met collection, The Theater of Disappearance encompasses thousands of years of artistic production over several continents and cultures, and fuses them with facsimiles of contemporary human figures as well as furniture, animals, cutlery, and food. Each object—whether a 1,000-year-old decorative plate or a human hand—is rendered in the same black or white material and coated in a thin layer of dust.
The artist has reconfigured the environment of the Cantor Roof by adding a new pergola, a grand tiled floor, a bar, public benches and augmented planting throughout the space. The Met’s own alphabet has even been incorporated into the graphic identity of the project. To realize this extensive work, the artist immersed himself in the Museum and its staff for many months, holding conversations with the curators, conservators, managers, and technicians across every department who contributed to the realization of this installation.
The melding of technology (3-D Scanning and Printing) with ancient art to create something brand-new is exciting for a number of reasons. To start, it looks amazing – Like something out of an anime or post apocalyptic art loving future. Secondly the implication that everything is getting scanned into a database and that we might never properly lose any art again fills me with glee.
So while we don’t live in New York City anymore – we still appreciate it. Possibly more than we did when we were actually residents.
There are still just over two weeks for you to back The Willo Plush on Kickstarter! Go get you a cuddly little Willo! He likes ice cream!
Beyond Bushwick 