Examine the Maybes

My parents were in town this weekend to see me dance in a show, and between that, seeing the incredibly fabulous An American In Paris on Broadway (which everyone needs to see so it stays open long enough that I get cast in it and can do that magic eight shows a week), and doing some new-apartment shopping with them at Home Goods (which I expected to be nice and peaceful but was actually more like this), we went to the Guggenheim.

I would like to share a few pieces on display at the world-renowned museum.  They are part of a collection by Peter Fischli and David Weiss that takes up the majority of the famous spiral ramp:

"Three Blobs"

Well, at least it's accurately titled....


"Bread"

...okay...

"Cassius Clay after His Fight with Joe Frazier" 

... (Mmhmm, yep, that's totally what I thought of when I looked at this.  Another very accurate title.... Or perhaps it's left over from when they decided "Three Blobs" sounded better than "Four Blobs.")

Oh, and Sunday at a Toys 'R' Us (which was next to the nightmare Home Goods and where I got a gigantic bubble blower which I proceeded to use as soon as I got outside to blow bubbles all over the sidewalk... I'm currently wondering if blowing bubbles inside my apartment is a bad idea... but I digress...), I saw this interpretation of bread.  I would like to know what makes one interpretation a Guggenheim-worthy art piece and the other part of a $7.49 plastic toy for five-year-olds.  Really, I'm curious.

I did get a kick out of this piece:

"Mr. and Mrs. Einstein Shortly after the Conception of Their Son, the Genius Albert"

And the one below reminded me of Alex Keaton's "Stock Market Crash of 1929" interpretive dance from Family Ties:

"Free Market Economy"

(And, on a sidenote, I totally, honestly, genuinely did not realize that this accumulation of stuff that looks like it's from someone's garage was actually on display as a piece of art in the exhibit until I went to the Guggenheim's website just now to get the artists' names.  I thought it was just a bunch of the materials they had used to create their pieces.  I also sat down on a bench at one point that I'm still not entirely sure was actually a bench as opposed to an exhibit -- there was, after all, a rubber recreation of a bench on display.  I sadly did not take a picture of it, but if I remember correctly, its title was "Bench."  It looked like a bench.)

There is definitely something to be said for whimsicality in art, and there were pieces (like the Einstein one) that made us smile, and at times we were laughing.  There could easily have been a collection of a select number of the sculptures that I would have walked away from thinking they were charming and delightful... but a note at the beginning of the exhibit said the collection was an interpretation of all the knowledge in the whole world... And I'm not sure whether we were always laughing with the art or at the art....

Alas, we realized we would have to look elsewhere to satiate our appetite for art, so we headed on over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we picked up a map, my parents asked me where I wanted to go, and I immediately exclaimed, "19th and 20th Century European Art!!"  Once there I sighed a happy sigh, declared, "THIS is my kind of art," and got lost in the luminous eyes of Joan of Arc and the incredible play of light in works by artists such as Charles Jacque and Johan Christian Dahl; I heard the birds, smelled the forest, and felt the wet dirt beneath my feet in Robert-Léopold Leprince's "Interior of a Wood at Pierrefitte;" I felt the breeze in my hair, the spray of ocean on my skin, and the setting sun after a perfect beach day with friends in Boudin's "On the Beach, Sunset"....  I wondered what circumstances had led Julius von Leypold's Wanderer in the Storm on his lonely path and what silly moment had just transpired moments before my arrival between the little boy and his mother in Léon-Augustin Lhermitte's The Grape Harvest.  Paintings like these that engage my imagination and transport me just as a book or play do are what I love in art.  So while I know I already recently wrote about what I believe constitutes art, my weekend art visit with my parents made me think about the following paragraph I wrote in high school for a college application, addressing more specifically what I personally respond to and am moved by in art.  So from my 17-year-old self, though every word is still true today:
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The art I most enjoy is that which engages me emotionally and challenges my imagination without being didactic. . . art that encourages me to think without telling me what to think.  I enjoy Edward Hopper, for example, because his work is subtle and suggestive; it challenges me to fill up the empty spaces, to imagine the life, the before and after, of those who might inhabit a lonely work like Nighthawks.  Similarly, I enjoy imagining the life and stories behind Van Gogh’s A Pair of Wooden Shoes, or the thoughtful meanderings suggested by Wyeth’s Christina's World.  In much the same way, I most enjoy literature that suggests alternatives and makes me think.  For example, what if, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it is the ghost rather than the uncle who is the really evil force behind the action. . . or what if it is Hamlet himself?  Or how does F. Scott Fitzgerald succeed in making the indisputably amoral and egocentric Gatsby an appealing character when Albert Camus, in The Stranger, fails (at least for me) to evoke empathy for his similarly amoral and egocentric narrator?  When literature poses questions for me, the alternatives are rich and make every rereading a new adventure.  In music, I am fond of classical composers like Beethoven and Brahms, whose music is so full of emotion that the imagination can explore new paths on each hearing, and I enjoy the musical storytelling of Harry Chapin because of his ability to intertwine music and words to draw emotional music-pictures.  For me, the best art is that which opens alternatives, inspires thought, and encourages me to examine the maybes.