I love MOMA

I love MOMA.

I love MOMA because I got a membership for Christmas and I can go there any time I want (thank you Kt, that was one of the best Christmas presents ever). A MOMA membership card is like an unlimited-rides metro card, but better: you don’t have to think twice if you need art; you can go to the same show many times (and you discover that every time is different). A membership card makes you free and eliminates any money considerations standing between you and your art cravings.

I love MOMA because they allow people to take pictures. You cannot quite touch the paintings and the scultpures, but you can smell them, capture them, run around them, bond with them. Art becomes something that happens between you and the piece. You are not forced in a stiff, “just watch and shut up” pose, which is the paradox of so many museums that want to preserve art (and the art mystique) so badly that they kill it. (There are limitations at MOMA too, of course, but they are few and enforced with some respect.)

I went to see again the sculptures of Richard Serra, which illustrate so well why museums need encourage people to get more intimate with art. There was a group of young guys visiting the exhibit and one of them said, standing still in front of the huge round copper-colored wall of Band: “I just don’t get it.” A few minutes later, they were walking through the tilted passages (if you stay with it, you can feel the space continuously warping and changing texture and you can feel your body opening up and tensing, in an almost predictable pattern). They had big smiles on their faces. They’d got it.

[Watch Richard Serra’s walking and talking about Band on YouTube.]