I'm a certified nut case.
Who else will cry when coming face to face with a painting? True, it was a Van Gogh. True, it was one of my favorite paintings of his. True, it was a moment when years of longing was fulfilled. But crying?
I think people at Metropolitan Museum of Art are used to such reaction. Nobody bothered about this crazy woman sitting motionless before the painting obviously in an emotional state.
The guard actually smiled at me when I involuntarily swore out loud when I walked into a Monet. I was quite shaken by Picasso as well. I thought of Mozart when I looked at his work--it had the same quality of effortless genius about it.
There's acres and acres of artwork in that place! While going through pieces of art through the ages (they have stuff from 3500 BC onwards), one is suddenly struck by a thought: artistic expression is not something that evolved with civilization. Man was born with the ability to be sublime.
The visit had the quality of the pilgrimage. I hadn't expected it to be so personal. Perhaps I was feeling vulnerable and disturbed because it was the eve of the 5th anniversary of 9/11. I had spent quite a lot of time thinking about man's violence against man.
It occurred to me that it is the curse of our race that the exquisite and the trivial, the profound and the banal, and the sensitive and the violent co-exist. Maybe we need blood and gore to be able to juxtapose the glory of vision.
Whatever.
Who else will cry when coming face to face with a painting? True, it was a Van Gogh. True, it was one of my favorite paintings of his. True, it was a moment when years of longing was fulfilled. But crying?
I think people at Metropolitan Museum of Art are used to such reaction. Nobody bothered about this crazy woman sitting motionless before the painting obviously in an emotional state.
The guard actually smiled at me when I involuntarily swore out loud when I walked into a Monet. I was quite shaken by Picasso as well. I thought of Mozart when I looked at his work--it had the same quality of effortless genius about it.
There's acres and acres of artwork in that place! While going through pieces of art through the ages (they have stuff from 3500 BC onwards), one is suddenly struck by a thought: artistic expression is not something that evolved with civilization. Man was born with the ability to be sublime.
The visit had the quality of the pilgrimage. I hadn't expected it to be so personal. Perhaps I was feeling vulnerable and disturbed because it was the eve of the 5th anniversary of 9/11. I had spent quite a lot of time thinking about man's violence against man.
It occurred to me that it is the curse of our race that the exquisite and the trivial, the profound and the banal, and the sensitive and the violent co-exist. Maybe we need blood and gore to be able to juxtapose the glory of vision.
Whatever.
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