One Hundred Years of Fame

On Saturday, I spent hours and hours looking at art that didn't move me.   Unknown names on paitnings that streched across the halls of a converted townhome on Park Avenue's Museum Row.  Lovely enough, scenes of winter, summer, a couple idlying, but none of them transcendent, mysterious, mind-boggling.  I wandered about the place: What was it all about this National Academy Museum of Art, whose youngest member had been Andrew Wyeth. Now I could get lost in his paitning:  a woman playing cricket in field faraway on a dark autumnal evening; wearing the long dress of the day; fidgeting with her stick, or ball, the hangars.   Simple but baffling, and I couldn't break it down - no matter what. I could look at her for hours. It made me wander about what Pasternak said that the true artist imposes his will on the work. If this is true, then what I was seeing in this Wyeth was the microscopic pallette and layering of his soul exposed on a canvas for immortality. What a burden. But, why couldn't these other guys do the same? Maybe, they weren't willing to make that committment.  It seemed like a very long time to be around that way, exposed for eternity with no rest at hand. The people on the tv screens talked about the painters in the place as their peers, their works, their stories. Interesting enough. But, their peers weren't O'Keefe, Pollock, Warhol.

The Guggenhein was my original destination. But, I ran into it this place because it was silent, because no one was buying tickets (lately I gravtitate towards the most quietest places in the city, and I spend my day idllying there). On my way out, I asked the ticket guys about the place. The first guy didn't know what it was all about. The second guy said it was an organization of artists who voted their peers into the organization as members and displayed their works for exhibition at the museum.  Around since the 1800s.  Incredible, a place where the mediocre came to rest. It was such a revelation to me.  That someone was keeping track of this stuff. I thought such things would have a quicker death than anything else. Maybe being around 100 years is too much posterity for such art.  It was all interesting but it left me with no feelings to take home afterwards.