Early American Art at The Met

I discovered a good blog at howtolive.org. This guy Tom over there seems to share many of the same ideas I work with at New Aquarius. While I’m focusing on personal awareness, and using our talents and innate good sense to live well within the context of a society seems to discourage the endeavor, Tom takes a broader view: learning how to live. Many times, I think we’re talking about the same thing. I encourage you to check it out. Good articles and interesting links. I’ve decided that his will be the first link I publish here. Look down in the link list, and visit by all means, but remember to come back here! Tom has taken a lot of time to make his blog available for subscriptions. I’d like to do that as well. I have to look into it. The appropriate feed files are on my server, but Tom has links to a number of aggregators.

It was oppressively warm in New York this weekend, so my wife and I thought it best to do something inside during the hottest parts of the day. We decided to skip the bike ride and hit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The last time we went, I didn’t get to Egypt or Greek and Roman, so we went for it. While wandering about, I came across an enormous room of early American exhibits that I’d never seen before. It was awful! It seems that early American art consisted mostly of portraiture and poor portraiture at that. Many of the portraits were by unknown artists. Too right! It didn’t help that most of the pieces were mounted on an ad hoc steel grating that was painted white. The whole mess was set behind glass, upon which some genius at the Met shined floodlights from the center of the aisles. The glare on the glass was so awful it seemed as if someone was trying to soften the blow of these awful paintings by discouraging the views of patrons. The exhibit reminded me of a trip to Levitz, walking through the warehouse, looking for exits.

The portraits captured very little of the context of their creation and even less of the personas of their subjects. They seemed to have been created by artists lacking the ability, if not the understanding of what they were doing. I’m not an artist, and only a frustrated critic, but it seemed that most American art, if this exhibit represents any authentic cross-section, was created more by artisans than artists. Perhaps that’s exactly what one should expect from a fledgling little band of colonies trying to gain footing. But do we need a whole room of these monsters? American art had no way to go but up, and that thankfully occurred. Whew!

The subjectivity at work in the choices of the early American exhibits gave me pause. Who’s to say what ends up at The Met and what ends up in the fire? The lesson is to keep doing what you do. Attempt to do it well. That’s enough. The significance won’t matter that much to a great number of people, so it shouldn’t be about that. Just make your point, and contribute to the best of your ability. Maybe they’ll put your blog under glass on Lower Broadway. People gotta walk somewhere, right?