Red hot MoMA: A photo essay

Were you expecting something salacious? Well you can forget it. This time.

Nothing will drive you stir crazy quicker than a three-day weekend in the middle of a cold, dark February. If you don't get the hell out of the house you'll be driven mad and you might start picking off your family.

I dragged everyone into the Museum of Modern Art for the afternoon. The Daughters are still too young to have any real appreciation for what they're seeing—to them, there's no difference between what they see at MoMA and a poster they'd see in a restaurant—but I'm trying to plant little seeds of corruption. Plus, I get in free with my corporate ID. A real value, since admission is up to $20 bucks per adult!

There's a big, BIG Abstract Expressionist exhibit running through April 25th. I'm not a huge Abstract Expressionist fan, but it's as important a gathering of these works as you'll ever see under one roof in your lifetime, so it's worth a visit.

The first thing I did was hit 'em with an uppercut—Marcel Duchamp's readymade sculpture Bicycle Wheel. I tried to explain how anything can be art and that it's all very subjective and in the eye of the beholder, etc., etc. Then I started to bore myself, had mercy on them, and kept my mouth shut.


There's a long room with a Monet water lilies triptych along one wall. The museum cleverly set a bench in front of it so people could sit and zone out. It really does calm your nerves and makes you yearn for a mug of warm milk and honey.


"Mommy, is that woman drowning?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because Brad broke her heart."
"...?...!...?...What?!"


I was standing off to the side and overheard 9-Year Old Daughter explain to 4-Year Old Daughter that the artist put the canvas on the floor and dribbled paint all over it. Muuhahaha! My work is almost complete.


There's a room full of Mark Rothko's work. I like him a lot. He has one painting that he did over and over and over again, but it's a good painting! (Kind of like the Rolling Stones, who have been reworking that one song for decades.) I heard a story once that some of Rothko's works are done on untreated canvases and are simply fading away and cannot be saved. Can anyone confirm that?


The museum is an exhausting experience. Even *I* get wiped out after a while! But I choose to think of this as their commentary on these goddamn Ad Reinhardt monochrome paintings. ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz.


The most beautiful work of art is, of course, the city itself. I think the MoMA architects knew that and created these windows that look like picture frames.