Just queue here for a MoMAnt
And now, content.
Today I finally got up off my ass and dragged myself to the MoMA exhibition. I've been threatening to go for a while, but always had more important things to be doing (which usually involved sleeping).
I'd been vaguely hoping that the crowds would thin out a bit, but it seems the problem with a city the size of Berlin is that you can't really wait until everyone's been to see something. There's just too many of everyone.
So instead, I joined everyone in the queue (about half of which is shown above), and spent a merry two hours eating sandwiches, admiring the Potsdamer Platz skyline, and reading Die Megabit-Bombe (which is heavy going, but worth it for some interesting ideas).
Due to the fact that people were only being allowed in to the gallery at the rate that other people were leaving, it was one slow-moving queue. I made a brief attempt to determine the likely visitor-per-hour throughput of the gallery, but I never could follow those multicoloured Communications Theory slides (sorry Kevin), so I decided to just give up and wait.
Someone must have done the maths right, though, because we got there in the end, and things were only mildly crowded inside. There was a small amount of moshing around the more popular paintings, but no serious problems for any sensibly-tall person.
Anyway, after all that -- yes, I did like it. As my ability, and probably yours, to write or think coherently has long ago been lost to excessive PowerPoint-exposure, there follow Cron's Highlights of the MoMA Exhibition in Bullet-points:
Incidentally, most of the abovementioned moshing was being done by people wearing "audioguides". They appeared to be wandering around following the directions on the tape, oblivious to the world around them. Since this already had a kind of Snow Crash flavour to it, I reckon there's an interesting potential in fitting the "audioguides" with a radio and some kind of location device.
People could then be directed to different paintings under the control of some kind of anti-moshing traffic-management software that automatically prevents them all from converging in one spot. And then when some guy with a Katana tries to steal your paintings, your mindless droid security force is already in place.
Today I finally got up off my ass and dragged myself to the MoMA exhibition. I've been threatening to go for a while, but always had more important things to be doing (which usually involved sleeping).
I'd been vaguely hoping that the crowds would thin out a bit, but it seems the problem with a city the size of Berlin is that you can't really wait until everyone's been to see something. There's just too many of everyone.
So instead, I joined everyone in the queue (about half of which is shown above), and spent a merry two hours eating sandwiches, admiring the Potsdamer Platz skyline, and reading Die Megabit-Bombe (which is heavy going, but worth it for some interesting ideas).
Due to the fact that people were only being allowed in to the gallery at the rate that other people were leaving, it was one slow-moving queue. I made a brief attempt to determine the likely visitor-per-hour throughput of the gallery, but I never could follow those multicoloured Communications Theory slides (sorry Kevin), so I decided to just give up and wait.
Someone must have done the maths right, though, because we got there in the end, and things were only mildly crowded inside. There was a small amount of moshing around the more popular paintings, but no serious problems for any sensibly-tall person.
Anyway, after all that -- yes, I did like it. As my ability, and probably yours, to write or think coherently has long ago been lost to excessive PowerPoint-exposure, there follow Cron's Highlights of the MoMA Exhibition in Bullet-points:
- Favourite painting that wasn't Starry Night: The Dance. This doesn't look like much in a small print, but in all its seven-foot-tall glory, it really took me by surprise.
- Favourite four-foot shiny thing: Bird in Space. I do not, in general, get sculptures, but this one I can dig.
- Favourite non-shiny flying-related thing: Giacomo Balla's Swifts.
- Most surprising thing: The Persistence of Memory is only 33cm across, which explains why every large print of it I've seen looks a bit gammy :-) The real surprise is that being so small actually makes me like it more, because it's so insanely intricate.
- Least surprising thing: Seeing a load of Pollocks "in the flesh" did not make me transcend my ignorance and recognise them as great works of art. Same goes for lots of other stuff, usually involving rectangles of almost the same colour.
- Favourite abstracts: Agony by Archile Gorky (<daphne>I don't know why...</daphne>) and The Vertigo of Eros (brilliant depth and, wheee... swirly colours!)
- Favourite animal: Paul Klee's Cat and Bird
- Favourite dog in a supporting role: the Three Musicians'
- Favourite Goat: another Picasso. Maybe you have to know some goats personally to appreciate this one. Shut up, Steve. If you don't, just trust me - this sculpture is 100% perfect goatness.
- Most moving: Gerhard Richter's Baader-Meinhof cycle. I know nothing about art, and I wasn't born at the time (in fact, I was born exactly one year later), but this is the part of the exhibition I won't forget.
Incidentally, most of the abovementioned moshing was being done by people wearing "audioguides". They appeared to be wandering around following the directions on the tape, oblivious to the world around them. Since this already had a kind of Snow Crash flavour to it, I reckon there's an interesting potential in fitting the "audioguides" with a radio and some kind of location device.
People could then be directed to different paintings under the control of some kind of anti-moshing traffic-management software that automatically prevents them all from converging in one spot. And then when some guy with a Katana tries to steal your paintings, your mindless droid security force is already in place.
posted by cron | 11:17 p.m.
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