I headed out from the Hotel Le Jolie, a nice-enough hotel near the hipster section of Williamsburg. Caught the L to Manhattan. Thought I'd stroll, but when I emerged from the subway, I saw it was raining. So instead I popped back underground, caught the subway north, and was soon under my umbrella, waiting in line to go to the Guggenheim museum.
I'd heard from others that the Guggenheim museum was disappointing. But I'd seen "The International," ostensibly an action movie, but mostly a movie with lovingly-photographed architecture. It had featured a running gun battle in the Guggenheim. So I wanted to see the Guggenheim.
The Guggenheim was a disappointment. The art all felt very "me too". All the other museums have their Mondrians; therefore our museum must also have some Mondrians; ours must look like theirs, recognizably Mondrians.
The architecture perhaps concentrated too much on the helical ramp. There wasn't much space left for restrooms. I used a restroom; it was crammed into what seemed to be the interior of a sort of column. When I sat on the toilet, my knees touched the wall opposite. Never trust a famous architect to design a comfortable space.
I didn't stay long at the Guggenheim.
The Whitney was more interesting. A Glenn Ligon show gave me some puzzle design ideas. There were other things, too. A set of metal tiles laid on the floor. A security guard made sure that nobody stepped on them. They reminded me of another set of metal tiles at another exhibit of modern art; but those, visitors had been encouraged to step on.
I perhaps spent more time in line to enter MoMA than I spent in MoMA. But that doesn't mean I breezed through; it just means that the lines were pretty long. A few big walls were covered with art by Jennifer Bartlett, whose work warmed my engineer's heart: it was on quad-ruled paper.
One part of it caught my eye: each panel in this part consisted of three shapes. Each shape was either a circle, triangle, or square. Each shape was small, medium, or large. Each triad was presented, ordered from left to right, as squares, triangles, circles. Within that ordering, order was from big to small. Thus, you might have a medium square, a small square, and a medium circle. Once you figured out the rules she followed, the next question was: had she used every allowed shape-triad? She had.
Henrik Olesen also had art with nerd appeal. His portrait of K was some disassembled electronics. With a crowd of puzzled artgoers, I looked at a sheet of hard clear plastic with things mounted on it: pieces of a laser printer. It seemed to have been taken apart carefully, not Office Space gangsta style. People weren't crowding around the cardboard box on the floor. People have wonderful kipple-ignoring instincts. But I sidled over to the box and checked it out: it was supposed to be there. The printer, an HP Laserjet 2035, had come in this box; the box contained more printer parts, presumably those that could not be easily mounted on the plastic sheet.
There were some Guerilla Girls posters—displayed on purpose, not snuck in.
There were four photos by Ai Weiwei. In each, you could see the photographer's hand flipping the bird at some nation's great landmark. Ai Weiwei had recently been imprisoned by Chinese authorities. The Chinese government didn't like him because his art had highlighted some ways that government corruption had killed Chinese children. Looking at these photos, I remembered some other reasons the government might lock him up: he was kind of obnoxious. (Still, better to keep him free to shine a light on those who would kill children.)
Sophie Taeuber-Arp's "Schematic Composition" wanted to mean something in Morse code, but didn't quite.
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