The Cocktail Party Effect

Timken Museum of Art Entrance The Timken Museum of Art greats its guests with the words everyone wants to hear: “It’s free!”   Everyone loves free things, but the relief of not paying is more significant to some than others. Walking through the Timken allowed me to examine some privileges I’ve had in my life and understand just how significant it is to have a museum that is free but extensive. As I strolled through the galleries, I was taken back to my golden college years and was reminded of my art history courses and the trips I took while studying abroad. Luca Carlevarijs’s The Piazzetta at Venice transported me back to St. Mark’s Square when I went with my brother drinking cafés and getting lost in the narrow Venetian roads. These paintings transported me through time and space as my mind traveled from San Diego in 2019 all my European adventures from a variety of previous years. I had been given a free ticket through memory lane! The Piazzetta at ...

Entrance to the PostSecret exhibit The key word for the Museum of Man is interactive. There were a number of exhibits that engaged its audience with methods as simple as writing down fears and tying them to a dreamcatcher in the Monsters exhibit. But PostSecret , the winning exhibit for audience interaction, takes engagement to another level as the entire content was created by regular people. PostSecret is a collection of secrets written on post cards from average people, all sent to the curation of Frank Warren who began the project in 2004. Strangers would anonymously mail personal secrets to Warren which are now read and relatable to other strangers. I greatly appreciated PostSecret’s ability to have me empathize and not just sympathize with nameless strangers. I think the existence of this exhibit demonstrates a social cry for connectivity that many seem to be lacking. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but PostSecret is not a unique concept. As a native New Yorker,...

Kangaroo (2017) by Michael Cook Admittedly, photography is not my favorite medium, but I wanted to give the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego a fair chance. I do not hate photography, I just appreciate other mediums (like painting) more. With the ease of a smartphone camera and the abundance of images on social media, photography seems commonplace to me. While I may be indifferent about photography, I have always wanted to go to Australia; luckily for me, the exhibit is called  “Defining Place/Space: Contemporary Photography from Australia.” The exhibit was divided by individual artists who gave a brief summary of what they hoped to achieve in their series of chosen photos. Through this exhibit, I was able to identify what I believe to be the unique strengths of photography. A Moment in Time and Patrick Pound Patrick Pound is a Melbourne-based artist whose presented work is a series of photos that he found making a complication called Air Moving Right . ...