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 . ...

The Arch (1975) by Alexander Calder The theme of the current exhibit at Storm King Art Center in Orange County New York is follies . ‘Follies’ indeed is a word I would use to explain the first portion of my visit to this center. My trip to Storm King was broken up into an outdoor and indoor portion—I favored the latter greatly.  Outdoor sculptures, mostly abstract froms, make up the permanent collection of Storm King. The outdoor location of these sculptures is based in necessity as their size cannot be confined under a ceiling; the height range is between 67cm and up to 15m. There is something about wadding through grass, getting eaten alive by bugs, and the wind blowing away your map as you attempt to figure out what you are seeing that makes the exhibit less appealing. While I do love the great outdoors, I did not think they mixed well with art. This experience emphasized for me the importance of the space in which the art is placed. The location might not have t...

Entrance to the exhibit The theme of this year’s MET Gala was ‘camp,’ prompting celebrities to dress in outrageous outfits. At the time of the event’s photos overwhelming my Instagram feed, I had largely dismissed camp as something to be appreciated only by teenagers abusing a Snapchat filter. Personally, camp just seemed unsophisticated and, well, weird. However, the Camp: Notes of Fashion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art showed me the nuances of camp revealing a complex and elusive concept.   Presentation Camp is an attitude of sorts well captured by its French origin se camper which means ‘to flaunt’ or ‘to posture;’ camp is not one thing, but rather a complicated and calculated art of presentation.  Large parts of camp are related to how one stands to create an ideal form or ‘beau ideal’ such as contrapposto—standing in a way in which the arms and shoulders balance out the hips and legs—and often having an arm akimbo—hands on one’s hips wi...

   The Ten Largest (1907) Hilma af Klint Even though the exhibit “Paintings for the Future” featuring Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s work at the Guggenheim Museum ended this past winter, “The Ten Largest” series (featured above) has stuck with me. The ten pieces are labeled and thus ordered as a human life cycle beginning with childhood, going to youth, adulthood, and eventually old age. I believe examining the passing stages of one’s life is a universal concept, one to which people of all walks of life can relate. By engaging with this grandiose topic, af Klint’s “The Ten Largest” already has a heightened sense of importance in this exhibit. However, in addition to taking on such an ambitious topic, I think there is another layer to af Klint’s work as it transcends mediums as well. The design can be connected with the short story “Masque of the Red Death” by American writer Edgar Allen Poe . To my mind, a universal concept repeated with the same kind of imag...

Emergence (2013) Sayaka Ganz At the Stamford Museum and Nature Center , the building was small but the grounds were vast. The Nature Center had a petting zoo area, but I have never been one for animals, so I mostly stayed inside. Alas, the inside was filled with animals as well. The main exhibit featured animal sculptures by artist Sayaka Ganz which were made up of common household appliances like ladles and forks. The exhibit was named “Reclaimed Creations” to demonstrate how prosaic items can be aesthetically repurposed.   Some of the featured pieces were sculptures of horses. These 3D horses had a tremendous amount of movement to them despite being made of a multitude of static objects. Artists like 18th century British painter George Stubbs worked to revolutionize the portrayal of horses by drawing attention to muscle and tone of the animal itself -- demonstrated in "Whistlejacket" (seen below). While Ganz was not painting horses as Stubbs once did, she capture...

Katonah Museum of Art Building Katonah, NY had always been just a place I drove through on the way to a hike or trip upstate. However, when I found out there was an art museum there, I decided to make a place that had always been simply part of the journey, a destination. I ventured to this exhibit hoping to find some solace in the colors and textures of paintings that always bring me joy. I needed a distraction since I was having a crisis thinking about the state of the environment. Everything I read or watch on the news makes it seem like the planet is going to be up in flames tomorrow; internal anxiety for the environment comes easily for me.   The exhibit being shown at the Katonah Museum of Art called “The Edge Effect” aimed to use art as a catalyst for conversations about the environment. It was kismet; art and sustainability all at once was too well timed for my circumstances. Many of the works simply portrayed scenes found in nature. Some were straightforward...