(no subject)

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.