Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Tourist At Home

Saks Fifth Avenue Rockefeller Center in the summer time.


Steps overlooking Song Dong exhibit
Ron Arad chair


Song Dong exhibit


This is a display of books full of blank pages opened on a four sided table. It is one of those exhibits I don't get.


I've been feeling guilty about neglecting my city to visit foreign places so I remedied the situation by visiting two NYC attractions today. The Museum of Art and Design and the Museum of Modern Art. This was my first visit to the Museum of Art and Design. I went to see a glass jewelry exhibit but ended up falling in love with the glass by Klaus Moje, the furniture by Gord Peteran (he recycles lots of old, discarded stuff) and the ceramics. No pictures are allowed so you will just have to visit the museum or the website to see the great stuff there.

I hadn't been to the MOMA in years. In fact, I have not been there since it reopened a while back. I usually don't like modern art and I am to cheap to spend the $20 it costs to get in but when the UFT paper had free coupons, I had to take advantage. The museum was great. I saw a fantastic photography exhibit. Many of the photos looked like my pictures so now I am inspired to figure out what the differences are. (I''m sure there are plenty of differences.) There was also an exhibit by an Ron Arad, who designs all kinds of wild chairs . Some of those are pictured above. Then there was a major exhibit by a Chinese artist, Song Dong. He embraced the Chinese ideology of not wasting anything and has a display of the contents of his mother's home. This was fascinating. Some of the modern art I still will never get, but the museum was definitely worth a visit.

2 comments:

mathman42 said...

MAD has an excellent program for a student trip. It fills up quickly; I didn't get to it last year. Do you ever just chill out ?

Pissedoffteacher said...

I've never done a school trip. I guess I should.

I thought about taking kids to the Whitney when I was there last year. There was so much geometry in the art that I thought could make the class relevant. Maybe this year.