New York City, part 4
Sep. 20th, 2025 09:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I took the subway to 86th & Central Park West with every intention of walking straight across the park to be at the Met (the art museum, not the opera house). The thing is, Central Park was designed to facilitate relaxation via meandering paths. So I got turned around in the park a couple of times, thereby exploring way more of it than I meant to. Favorite part: the big, OTT fountain where you can row boats. Less favorite part: serious cyclists hauling ass on what, it must be said, are well-engineered paths for them. They wanna ride, I get it, but the laws of physics demand caution from pedestrians.
But on to the Met! Which is gigantic! And the same price as MoMA! Navigation wasn’t easy for me: I ended up going up, over, and down to get to the Man Ray exhibit, nomming sushi along the way. During that wander I learned that a French artist in the 1870’s got grief from critics because the women in his painting weren’t pretty enough; most of the models were his sisters.
So yeah, the intensity of the “fuck you” that the early twentieth century art movements delivered to the art establishment makes a lot of sense in that context. And who better than Man Ray, MKA Emanuel Radnitzky, an outsider even to the Paris art scene where he flourished, to mess with things? He moved from painting to airbrushing, then basically invented contact prints (“rayographs”), made experimental short films, and made everyone from his artist friends to an Italian countess love looking weird in his photos. Yeah, he was clearly a het dude, but.
Here’s why you should always read the blurb: you might not immediately notice that the 16th-century Dutch print you’re looking at is porn. And at least when it came to ceramics, the Greeks got their act together less than 200 years after the Bronze Age collapse, in the so-called geometric period.
Recovered in my hotel room for a couple of hours. Had a fancy BBQ sandwich down the street. (I’ll be getting to restaurant recommendations today.) Then crashed at a reasonable hour in this time zone. Je ne regrette rien.