I was recently at the Getty and had the pleasure of experiencing an excellent video installation: http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/nicole_cohen/  As frequent museum-goers, we are all used to “please be seated” installations in museums, in which visitors are invited to sit in chairs like those on display. This exhibit did more.  Set in an all white room, away from the rest of the museum, the only color was in the video monitors hanging above each chair. This installation invited visitors to sit in six different pure white repros of eighteenth-century French chairs from the museum and to see one’s form superimposed in a video of the chair in its historical context.     As I reclined in a French armchair and saw my blue-jean bedecked self in a luscious Parisian salon, I was able to experience the chair with my body and to observe how its form affected my body — to notice how my posture changed, how I carried myself, how others might view me. The visual experience of the installation became a fantasy in which the visitor played a part, analogous to a museum or house museum visit more generally, in those moments when one wonders what would it be like to jump on that feather bed or to try on those weighty petticoats. California clean and white like the Getty itself, the space helped me make sense of the museum as a whole.  I expected to find the European period rooms jarring after coming out of the SoCal sun, but I didn’t. This installation helped capture the mental leap required to move back in time and across continents.  It made me surer that the ideal museum does not offer virtual reality, but alternate realities, opening windows onto other worlds and giving viewers tools to analyze and to interpret those foreign spaces.  That is why I found this installation, with its six different chairs, six variations of a theme, so very satisfying. �

Please check out a small but rich gallery, American Art: 1850-1870, which opened this week at the Metropolitan.  In addition to household furnishings, there are some stellar paintings and sculptures, most notably Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits, on temporary loan and soon to disembark for its new home at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas.  Confession: I worked on this gallery and would love to hear your feedback.  Love it or hate it, let me know your thoughts.

(The gallery is located just beyond the Vanderlyn panorama of Versailles in the American Wing.) �

I am one of the so-called philistines who just doesn’t get modern art.  The other night I went to the opening for the Louise Bourgeois retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum and was confronted with a variety of scribbles on paper, twisted metal, and “found” objects such as old doors and generic glass tableware.  There is no shortage of irony in watching beautiful people wax poetic about art that is intentionally, inherently mundane, dare I say ugly.  I guess the liberating thing about her work is that it is polymorphous, able to take on whatever meaning suits the viewer.  Whatever.  The worst part is, for all my griping and frustration, modern art always elicits strong reactions from me, and therefore it is arguably more successful than my beloved (but sometimes forgettable) furnishings and perspectival paintings. �

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Cheers,

Derin, Nick, and Phil