The Metropolitan Museum of Art's great for crazy juxtapositions. Here I juxtapose two already juxtaposed things from recently opened exhibitions on subjects worlds and millennia apart, Divine Egypt and Man Ray: When Objects Dream. Above is an apparently unfinished but much-touched 3000-year-old statue (on loan from the Louvre) of four aspects of the goddess Hathor - a crowned cow surrounded by serpent-, lion- and human-headed manifestations. Entirely unrelated but somehow resonant in my image-saturated mind, Man Ray's 1916 collage-like painting "Legend," source of one of the brightly colored prints in his almost animated 1919 "Revolving Doors" (the exhibit's recreation of which someone kindly filmed). Have these less than nothing to do with each other? Precisely. For good or ill, a museum like the Met functions like a collage, a revolving door, maybe a many-faced goddess.
