Alright,

Finally the quintessential New York experience, walking down 5th avenue to the Museum of Modern Art.

For those of you coming to NYC Uniqlo sponsors free Friday nights from 4-8pm and the lineup starts on 54th St. between 5th Ave and the Avenue of the Americas.

This was the result of me keeping a wall on my right hand side and wandering into a closed part of the museum…whoops! On the upside, I found cows.

This had to be one of my favorite floors, it held both architecture drawings/concepts/models and photography. It was interesting to see the graphic design work of Massimo Vignelli forever transformed the New York Subway system. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough money in the Transit budget to implement his full plan but to see it in its entirety was very cool now knowing how to actually get around the city!

Kudos to the lighting designers at MoMA, every room is basically lit for 1/5th f/2.8 ISO 100 (for the non-photographers, this is dark). They say no tripods and I think it’s silly to just capture an image that’s already online somewhere you’ll see a lot of my shots from this series are going to be from the ground.

I think the best part of wandering through all the floors and various exhibitions is that Art can be ANYTHING. For example these canvases just have text written on them. I find that sometimes my view of what “Art” is can grow to be a little too traditional.

For someone that doesn’t work in the studio too much I thought this was an interesting quote. Perhaps I’ll be spending some more time in there shortly.

Even looking out from the inside the view is wonderful.

Here is a piece by Jackson Pollock, one of my favorite painters.

It was kind of funny to walk into a gallery to a surge of people (most of the area’s were easy to walk through) each time it was for some “famous” piece of art. I always wonder what makes a piece of art famous. There are so many talented artists in the gallery that get walked by and some people only go to see a handful of paintings in a sea of skill. You can see the fan horde below.

Then there is the art that I will never understand, white paint on a white canvas… still working on understanding it… maybe that’s the point?

6 floors and the building doesn’t feel cramped at all, I tip my hat to the Architect.

Another example of a fan gallery, the important piece here ryhmes with “parry bight”…

Top floor, this is how to promote a newly released book. Have all the walls in the gallery white then at the top of the escalator wrap the whole room in red.

More fan Love…sorry…

Overall some of my favorite pieces were;

• Richard Avedon’s Unemployed Blackjack Dealer, I loved the lighting and contrast in the image.
• Dropping Milk, I think this is a really cool concept and usage of a triptych.
• 75 watt, this was an object designed with only the process of making it in mind to show how humans are now machine than they ever were before. They choreographed with a large ballet company each and every motion. A very cool video.
• Morellet’s 40,000 squares, he divided a canvas into 40,000 squares and had his wife/son read him numbers out the the local telephone book (odds blue, evens yellow…or vice versa, I forget). It came off looking like a historic QR code.
• Mine Kafon, just a cool piece of wind powered design for clearing minefields.
• Thinking Machine 4, it visualizes the computer’s thought process when playing against you in chess.

This trip made me realize I need to spend more time looking outside of my medium for inspiration. You can only do so much inside your own box, while there is so much out there that other people have discovered!

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