Vacation5000: More Than Just Counties

I fly into Newark airport a little before six in the morning, claim my suitcase, and head toward the rental car claim area, several stops down the "SkyTrain." There I discover that my off-brand car rental company isn't located in the rental car area, but rather operates out of a hotel way the hell over yonder. So, it's all the way across the airport again on the SkyTrain, and then a wait for the airport shuttle, and then several minutes of careening through what seems like a completely random series of loopy roads, and then I arrive at the sketchy rental car company, which has a big sign in its entrance explaining that you can't take their cars any of the places that I plan on going. Sooo, it's back to the shuttle, back to the now very familiar SkyTrain, and back across the airport megaplex to where the real rental car companies are.

Finally blessed with wheels, I drove under the water to a city I had long heard of, a mystical, magical place called Manhattan. Then I drove around for a while, enjoying the general vibe and the density of landmarks. Without too much ado, though, I made my way north to

The Cloisters

In a park near the northern tip of Manhattan, The Cloisters is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annex medieval collection. It is housed in an absurd and wonderful faux monastery into which various chunks of actual real European monasteries have been lovingly reassembled and inset.

There, I saw stuff like this:

and this:

...and of course this:

A few days later, I met up with the Monday Quiz at

Fallingwater

I was really impressed with the art inside of Fallingwater, but it turns out not to be especially well known, and there aren't good images available. The main deal, in any event, is the building itself:

So then, a few days go by, I visit some cherished friends and blow by others as if intentionally setting out to insult them, yadda yadda yadda, and I end up at:

Dia: Beacon

This museum of modern and contemporary art is the most striking exhibition space I've yet seen. It's a converted factory with lots of natural light and truly immense gallary space, the perfect place for larger-than-life exhibits. Regretably, much of the collection focuses on particularly arid strands of contemporary art, the schools that are forever questioning what exactly art is anyway. It was almost embarassing to enter a room filled with carefully prepared blank white canvases; that sort of gambit was fresh and interesting when Duchamps scrawled his signature on the toilet, but that was 92 years ago.

One of the highlights were some Sol Lewitt line drawings, which were not (in this case anyway) a big aesthetic thrill but always intellectually interesting.

For my money, though, nothing could compare to Zoe Leonard's You see I am here after all, a collage of about six zillion historical postcards of Nigara Falls sorted by perspective and arranged in a great horizontal series of rectangles. I was enchanted.

But none of this museum-goin' -- none of my life up to this point, really -- could prepare me for:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Don't try to see it all at once," Mrs.5000 quipped in an Email to my Yonkers base camp. Indeed. Let me put it this way: the Met could give a priceless, important work of art to every man, woman, and child of Hometown5000 -- indeed, probably of Homecounty5000 -- and still be able to put on a damn fine show. It is so vast and filled with wonders that I have been sad ever since, and I suspect will forever after be a little sad, that I am here and not there.

I mean, there's a medieval statue in there called "Virgin and Child with Bird," and it was just so beautiful that I thought I was going to start crying right there. It was sublime. And I took careful notes on it, took its accession number and everything, but it's not even significant enough to make the website. The fairly comprehensive website. See what I'm saying? The place is so ridiculously abundant that its afterthoughts would be the reason to build a museum in another town.

It was not unlike, but yet more sublime, than this one.

Anyway, I saw... everything. Like this:

And this:

And this:

And so on. I recommend it highly, the next time you want to look at art in New York City.