I came to New York for a few days for a friends wedding, and while here I stopped by for a brief visit at the Museum of Modern Art. I really enjoy the MoMA, and have visited there often. For the wedding of my friends Ron and Michelle my sisters and I got them a membership to the MoMA, which they have kept up ever since. I had about two and a half hours in the afternoon, so I stopped by.
The big exhibition that they have currently is 40 Years of Richard Serra Sculpture. I’ve seen some Serra pieces before, once in the Guggenheim in Bilbao, but wasn’t really impressed with this exhibition. I liked his pieces in the sculpture garden, but the rest of the things that were exhibited didn’t seem well utilized in the museum space. I think a lot of his stuff does better in a less formal environment, where you have more of an experience that isn’t focused on the sculpture itself, but on the harmonization with, and contrast to, the surrounding environment.
I really enjoyed pieces in the Automatic Update exhibition. Particularly, 33 Questions a Second, an interesting piece that randomly generates questions in rapid succession using some natural language processing techniques.
Over in the Architecture and Design Galleries, usually my favorite part of the museum, they had a great exhibition juxtaposing modern and old design. There were some really great examples in there, particularly the iMac / TV combo I highlight to the left. I also have an iPod / Radio combo shot that is cute. There were a lot of interesting functional design examples, and interesting examples of industrial design. That floor is always lots of fun to check out.
In the same area was an interesting look at Helvetica, the first font in the MoMA collection. Coincidentally, my friend Ron told me about an interesting documentary about the typeface that is something I would like to track down and see.
There was another nice exhibition called “What is Painting?” with contemporary art from the MoMA collection. I thought that one was well worth checking out. As always, a short trip over to the MoMA is always worth the effort, even if it has the most amazingly hard and tiring floors of any museum in the city. I swear they’ve learned the secret of gravity-control plating and artificially increase local gravity there by about 20%. My feet are always sore after even a short trip to that museum.
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