(I did learn a few things about how to use new media in the classroom, though it wasn't worth spending a whole day on it.) So I didn't have a chance to tell you about:• the Greenwich Village Hallowe'en Parade Wednesday night, our local carnival, Sixth Avenue thronged with people of all shapes and sizes in costumes, many handmade and very clever, a shapeless and joyful event although, by the end of it, you start looking even at people not in costume as if they're in costume!
• American Ballet Theater at City Center on Friday night, a gorgeous piece by Lar Lubovich called "Meadow" and an American classic I'd never seen, "Fall River Legend" (choreographed by Agnes de Mille to music by Morton Gould), which is a period piece - 1948 - but affected me powerfully.
I felt I knew this world, from Copland and Barber, Our Town and even Oklahoma... what shock to bring an axe onto a ballet stage! (The story is loosely based on the story of Lizzie Borden.)• my first big party: I fed eighteen people Saturday night, and people flowed easily through all four rooms of the flat, mine for a few more weeks. I was racing around like a madman opening the door, bringing out food (and then 9 cheeses), clearing away plates, opening bottles of wine, introducing people to each other. And I gather it was a "resounding success." Didn't have more than snatches of conversation with anyone, or fleeting gulps of wine (though I made sure to slow down around cheese time!), but by the end I was pooped and elated. I'm not sure why one has parties, really, but it felt like an offering, a gift to society, the world...
And yesterday I spent the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my first visit in over a year. There were no fewer than five special exhibitions I wanted to see - shameless showoff of a museum! The exhibitions were splendid, of course: (1) the Met's whole collection of Dutch masters, (2) baroque tapestries, (3) Central African reliquary objects presented for the first time (they claimed) as religious objects rather than just beautiful statues (pictures are from their site), (4) early photographs, and (5) three panels from
Ghiberti's Old Testament door to the Battisterio in Florence, recently restored and at eye level. I also nipped into the Japanese collection and the Chinese, and at one point found myself in the new Roman sculpture court (where the cafeteria used to be). Overwhelming as ever.The Met usually makes me melancholy, something about the extraordinary beauty of its vast collections, the worlds upon worlds of meaning it provides brief windows into - and the fact that every single piece found its way there because of money. (Unlike, say, the Louvre which benefited from conquests...) What was striking this time was that the role of money was front and center in many of the exhibits: we have truly entered a new Gilded Age, and the Met is clearly out to charm the new oligarchs and plutocrats. So, for instance, the Dutch collection was organized by date of acquisition, with rooms named after the benefactors. Half of the Japanese collection was devoted to recent gifts by named people, and the Chinese gallery anticipated a promised collection by an expatriate Chinese family. About Ghiberti and the tapestries we read about patronage and far-seeing benefactors for whom money was no object. And many of the African reliquary objects, we learned, had passed through the collections of great early-twentieth century artists (this exhibition protested a wee bit too much about the "universal" significance of these objects, their contribution to the "eternal" aspirations of humanity -
they should have let them speak for themselves).I suppose it's a good thing to make the business of art and museums explicit... or is it? In any case, it is a change from the ethos of public and national museums with which I'm familiar, which offer a direct encounter of the viewer off the street and the art object, without reminders of questions of provenance. Now it feels like I'm an outsider to the whole process: not an artist, and not rich enough to commission or buy and donate artworks.
