“Sir, you’re standing too close”
on January 27, 2012
That’s what a nearby security guard said to me when I was just inches away from Seurat’s “Circus Sideshow” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I realize in retrospect that, yes, I was definitely way too close to something that valuable, but come on man, I was just trying to discern the technique behind the color decomposition! Oh well. And now that the painting has my unworthy breath on it, its value has most likely been reduced by quite a bit. Desolé, Georges.
There are usually only two things that make New Jersey bearable in the winter: getting to spend time with my family and catching up with some old HS friends. But this time, there would be a third thing—the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wait, what’s that? It’s not even in New Jersey? Oh, right. I guess there are still only two things then.
Since entire books have been written about the Met Museum, let me just give you a couple of thoughts and impressions on my first ever visit to this fantastic mecca of art and culture.
First off, the Met is freaking big. I think that although I walked through 50% of its rooms during the day, I only saw/registered about 20% of the works on display. When I say “registered,” I mean it’s one thing to physically let photons reflected off the art to enter your eye, but it’s quite another to really feel something about it and let it sink in. By that definition, I’m probably generous in suggesting that I “saw” even 20% of the works.
Surprisingly, I felt most intrigued not by the European greats, but by the little windows into past civilizations. As humans, we always have a tendency to believe that we are the best civilization ever, right here right now. Perhaps that is because of Western reductionism’s proclivity towards seeing time as an arrow; in that case, the inevitable conclusion is that we’re always better off with the march of technology, right? Maybe the Mayans had it right and that time, when viewed through the lens of human events and history, is really a cycle after all. Maybe their incredibly long-lived civilization had seen a few of these cycles and had been around the block a few times to make an appropriate judgment?
Seeings all those relics of bygone civilizations made one thing very clear to me, which is that my perception of the past has been overly soured by Euro-centric history. Let’s face it: Europe has been a backwater society for most of the A.D. era, and it’s pretty bad to assume that one can linearly interpolate the human condition backwards to the paleolithic in this manner. The tendency to do just that is also an indication that Western reductionism has its grip on you. Bring forth the sine waves!
