I am a slut for Modern Art

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Overnight flight to NYC, arrive 7am with 11 hour layover. Just enough time to spend a few hours at MOMA before heading to London. The train from JFK to downtown Manhattan is a breeze. By the time I grabbed some fruit from a street vendor and took some photos of street life and found MOMA they were just about to open for the day. IT was a beautiful sunny day and I hadn't been here since they re-opened the museum. This is the kind of tourist attraction I can really get into. I love that feeling of making a pilgrommage with all the other varied and languaged people of the world to collectively view the best humanity has to offer. I started on the top floor. I knew I wouldn't make it all the way through but decided I'd rather take my time and enjoy as much as I could until it was time to catch the train back to JFK. There was a Jeff Wall retrospective. His work is large-scale photographic tableaus, backlit, carefully arranged still lives of modern day content and  classical structure. I couldn't stop looking at it, fascinated by the ornate compositions and trying to picture how he went about creating them. I kept thinking about Vermeer for some reason. Maybe it was the lighting...or the meticulous detail.

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Next, the permanent collection of Picasso, Van Gough, Miro, Matisse, Monet...when I turned a corner and came upon Van Gough's Starry Night I was so overcome that I wept...I forgot that they had that painting...I always react to his paintings that way. They have several at the Art Institute of Chicago and I find the fact that they are smaller than you would imagine makes you have to go right up to it and then you have this very intimate experience of noticing his brushstrokes and realizing that Vincent Fucking Van Gough put all those brush stroke there...it does it to me every time.

realizing that Vincent Fucking Van Gough put all those brushstokes there...it does it to me every time.

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I escaped to the 2nd floor to calm myself with a video installation by the Iranian filmmaker Abas Kiarostami. There were several rooms of meditative footage of gentle waves on a beach...the first one I came upon was of a piece of driftwood hanging out by the shore being massaged by the waves. While I was relaxing and taking it in, a woman came into the room pushing a man in a wheelchair. She apparently was having the same reaction to the piece as I was, finding it very calming and encouraging the man in the wheelchair to relax and enjoy it. She was very friendly and started talking to me, telling me that the man in the wheelchair was the actor Lou Jacobi, and she was his caretaker and they came here every Wednesday. She gave him a shoulder rub then looked at me and said 'You need on too" and sat me on the bench and gave me the best massage...I returned the favor, gave thanks to whatever deity it was that brought me to that room at just that moment and made my way toward London.