(no subject)

[seekingferret]

I've been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art probably a half dozen times in my life, starting when I was in middle school. And nobody has ever actually taught me how to enjoy that museum. I just can't manage it. I mean, I enjoy individual paintings, and I always find something in their collection that I'd never noticed before and excites me. But the overall experience doesn't work. I wander from masterpiece to masterpiece, senseless and passionless, my brain unable to make connections fast enough to process everything I've seen. I never spend enough time on a painting or sculpture, and I always feel like I'm missing more than I see.

I have a much better time at the Frick Museum, whose collection you can go through in an hour and a half or two hours and feel like you've seen everything, appreciated everything. The experience ties together better, too. That glorious building makes it all feel of a piece, instead of being scattered and random. The Met's layout is a ludicrous labyrinth.

And I have a better time at MoMa, though I still feel a sense of dislocation, because that dislocation feels intentional and purposed, artistically arranged instead of randomized. MoMa's confusion is designed, complementary to the artistic goals of the 20th century revolutionary orthodoxy. The Met's just emerges unwanted from its unmanageable bigness.

Comments

[verity]

I can only do about an hour - an hour and a half in a museum before I abruptly feel like I'm going to pass out (yay disabilities), which has, weirdly enough, made the Met much easier to enjoy. I usually pick one thing I want to see and visit it. I went to the Met at least ten times during the year I lived in New York, and each time I just did one or two things; I went to Egypt and only Egypt a few times because I love Egypt.

[seekingferret]

That's kinda my suspicion of the only way to enjoy the Met, but my problem with it is that it dismisses half of what makes the Met the Met. If I want to see 18th and 19th century masterpieces, I can go to the Frick. 19th and 20th century masterpieces, I can go to the Guggenheim. 20th and 21st, the Whitney or MoMa. Decorative arts from ancient cultures, I can go to the Museum of Natural History. There are so many great, specifically targeted and curated museums in New York that it seems like half the point of going to the Met is that you get to hop between a dizzyingly immense array of different styles, draw comparisons, see similarities, form syntheses. But the problem is it's dizzying. In your approach, you basically just treat the Met as a cadre of distinct and separate mini-museums.