Art is art

Magnet #1206 - Art is Art

I picked up this magnet, not surprisingly, at the MoMA, home of art that continually challenges me.

Ya'll know I love my art plain and sweet, and representative of what it's supposed to be. That I pretty much eschew avant garde work for pieces that appeal to me, that I can easily understand, and don't make me think too hard.

That's not to take away from avant garde, that's to say that while I deeply respect creativity, I'm at my core, a very lazy spectator.

That being said, I love cool shit.

And will go wherever in the City I can find it.

This weekend I went over to the Park Avenue Armory - a place that's taken me 16 years to discover - for the last day of Ryoji Ikeda's The Transfinite installation. No, I didn't know who Ikeda was, either, but just seeing the pictures and videos of the strobey lights and data and lit walls and people and general craziness, I knew I had to go.

I was not disappointed at all. The installation was in the supergiant drill hall, and had a front and back side, with different vantage points of the work. It was seriously a visual assault on the eyes and the ears, with strobey lights and pounding rhythms, blocking out all serious thought. At least til you opened yourself up to the experience, and just let it pulsate through you.

As my sister said, when she saw the videos, it was very Intersect-y, like on Chuck. Overall, it was definitely one of those quintessential New York experiences that have to be, well, experienced, rather than magnetblogged about.

So, here ya go, the front side, with all the light patterns on the floor and wall:


And then the backside of the installation, with all the data and numbers:


Finally, there's a whole set of interiors that you should see at the Armory, rooms designed by folks such as Stanford White with details like Tiffany windows. The place is a must-see, even when there's not a big installation in-house.