MoMa.

Couldn’t they have abbreviated it to something else. Anyways the museum of modern art or MoMa, is free Friday nights. The whole of New York turns up there Friday night 4-8 pm. Nice because everyone is well dressed and all the girls are lovely. Quite a young crowd for an art museum. But MoMa has an entire floor dedicated to Pixar, so prepare to be surprised.

The first and ground floor are dedicated to Pixar. Going through the exhibits really gives you a sense of the imagination these guys have.

I missed the Prints section on the 2nd floor and the sculptures in the garden. For some other Friday I guess.

The 3rd floor has the photographs and design section. The design section was nice, there was these models and photographs of a ‘house of spiritual something’ which caught my eye. It has a two walls meeting each other at right angles, with the main living area located underground within the right angle. The walls just serve as the doorway into the underground dwelling. Kind of looks like a wing. And the photographs of the house and the area surrounding it are marvelous.

The Robin Rhode media exhibits are a must see. He takes what is a simple idea [his works are basically graffiti on a wall and his interactions with them, to depict motion, caught as stills either as photographs or a movie of stills] and runs with it. The photographs of him catching fridges, furniture, and even an automobile as they appear to fall out from the sky are amazing. I mean you can’t help but feel good at the end by the childish spirit in his art.

The Odilon Redon exhibit is strange. His charcoal and pencil work are undoubtedly beautiful. The images he conjures up are fascinating. I didn’t understand his interpretation of Poe’s ‘The Masque of Red Death’ but his vision of Berenice is apt. The Masque of Red Death is about the princes who with his courtiers enclose themselves in a castle to escape death from a plague epidemic that rages outside the walls. The ball that they have is unfortunately intruded upon by a masked stranger, who at the stroke of midnight reveals himself to be the plague. And everybody dies. Redon’s interpretation is like a mangled face in a red vista. I imagined it as an encounter between the prince who stares in stark horror at death. Anyways Berenice makes up for it. This is a story of a man infatuated with this lady. He loves everything about her. But most of all he is tortured by visions of her beautiful teeth. Classic Poe. Driven by the visions when the lady dies, He goes in and retrieves her teeth. I like Poe because of the way he minutely describes every scene, every person, and their strange obsessions. And the painting captures this quite aptly. When Redon goes color, his visions just explode with paint. ‘Roger and Angelique’ for example the blues of the rock face and the brilliant white of the surf are astounding. The main protagonists Roger and his hippograph, Angelique and the sea monster are faintly drawn into the grand image. Green Death is astounding because of the sheer contrast between red and green in the painting. ‘http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2005/redon/redon.html’ will take you through the collection.

The fourth and fifth floor has art. Some of it beautiful. Some strange. But that’s the way abstract art is. Sometimes you get the feeling that these artists’s get genuine pleasure from signing their names on crap, which is then highly valued by their patrons.

MoMa redefines what collectible art is. The building itself is astounding in that there are several corridors that feel like balconies opening out into open spaces.

Went on the same day to the International Center of Photography, which is down the same street. Wasn’t impressed as the collection is small and just too focused on a few topics. Definitely avoidable.