Get Your Metrocard Here! Or, More Ways to Spend Money at MoMA

 









I refilled my Metrocard today … at MoMA.

A Metrocard vending machine is included in the exhibition Talk to Me, MoMA’s meditation on interactive design. Despite the exhibition’s theme, many of the objects on view can’t actually be handled; my 1990s brain prevented me from successfully engaging some of those that could. (Thankfully, the Menstruation Machine, 2010, is for display only … can the phrase ‘too much information’ apply to inanimate, if not inert, objects?) Signs tell viewers that they can enhance their experience of the exhibition by logging onto MoMA’s wifi with their phones; even my 2010 phone refused to cooperate. Then, I saw the Metrocard vending machine.

Once I determined that it was fully operational (if slightly modified—see the photos above), I took the opportunity, not to purchase one of the special-issue cards it dispenses, but to refill the card I’m currently using. Like most New Yorkers, I already have about six Metrocards in my wallet, each with $1.80 on it, or some other useless sum.

The experience was actually sort of great. I was lucky enough to be in the museum before it opened—a first, and a huge advantage (see The Museumgoer is, Against All Odds, Present). In fact, aside from the guards, I was alone at Talk to Me. I had only ever bought a Metrocard surrounded by harried commuters and clueless tourists. This was the cleanest machine I’d ever seen—none of the fingerprint-and-mystery-goo of your typical Metrocard vending machine. My credit card swipe was successful on the first try—another first. Mostly, though, it was a pleasure to interact with the machine without feeling rushed, without worrying about missing the next train. It gave me an opportunity to notice just how well-designed it is; it’s colorful and whimsical, like Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43, in MoMA’s collection).

It’s also communicative, like the electronic billboard in the 1991 movie “L.A. Story," which dispensed life lessons along with the traffic conditions. If this object existed, it would have fit perfectly into Talk to Me. “L.A. Story” is an urban fairytale, however, and while many of the objects in the show are supremely innovative, they didn’t speak to me on an emotional level, as MoMA’s curators suggested they might.

Postscript:

I was a little disappointed that Edward Kienholz’s The Friendly Grey Computer—Star Gauge Model #54 (1965) wasn’t included in the show. This kinetic sculpture, which is owned by MoMA, purports to interact with viewers by answering their questions—yellow flashing lights indicate yes, blue lights indicate no. Of course, Kienholz’s attitude toward technology was ambivalent—the “machine” sits in a rocking chair and a text tells viewers that “Computers sometimes get fatigued and have nervous breakdowns, hence the chair for it to rest in.” This may more accurately reflect most people’s feelings about technology than the organizers of Talk to Me realize.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Art Critic Invokes Undergraduate Textbook

Holland Cotter's front-page story in this week's New York Times Sunday Styles, "Male Models at the Line of Beauty," is ostensibly about the men's fashion shows at New York Fashion Week. Ill-equipped for this assignment (he writes that he was "learning on the job"), Cotter "pulled out [his] old H. W. Janson survey book" in the hopes of ... I'm not sure, exactly. As if taking his cues from the encyclopedic range and limited depth of the Janson book, Cotter jumps from one tenuous, superficial observation to the next: male models are beautiful like Greek statues; models line up on the runway like figures in a Byzantine mosaic (hmmm); utilitarian clothes are like Constructivist garment designs.

Cotter's take on the fashions are also head-scratchingly banal: "Tommy Hilfiger went sort of nuts with nautical stripes at his show" but "the men still looked dressed-down-drab." The article is filled with disclaimers like, "don’t listen to me, an art geek who wandered into a strange new world, about what men’s fashion should do," which makes you wonder how Cotter got stuck with this assignment in the first place.

"I’m deeply skeptical of the fashion-as-art talk of recent years," Cotter writes. His glib treatment of artistic sources here suggest that he may be skeptical of the appeal of fashion journalism to art-lovers as well. Regular readers of the Sunday Styles, of which I am one, might be insulted by this clunker (and our expectations aren't terribly high to begin with). But let's not. Mr. Cotter was probably just having a bad day, and we can always amuse ourselves with the wedding announcements.

The Museumgoer is, Against All Odds, Present

Artinfo reported today on a video game created by one Pippin Barr, a “Copenhagen-based game creator and scholar.” The game, which has the look of something you might have played on your Atari, begins when your avatar enters the doors of MoMA; he pays the $25 admission fee (yes, it’s gone up), passes through a sparsely hung gallery, and arrives at the line for The Artist is Present, the much-talked about Marina Abramovic performance which took place in the museum’s atrium last year. For those who could not attend the performance, it was streamed live on MoMA’s website. For those who missed that as well, there is Barr’s version.

Regular reader(s) of this blog may recall from a previous post that I am a bit squeamish about art that threatens to put me, the viewer, on display. It therefore never crossed my mind to sit across from Abramovic and stare awkwardly into her eyes for an indeterminate amount of time in front of scores of onlookers. Braver museumgoers than I, however, happily queued up for this opportunity. This is the experience that the player of Barr’s game endures. When I played the game, there were twenty-four people ahead of me. If you leave the game to do other things, thinking that when you return it will be your turn to face Abramovic, you are mistaken. Aggressive museumgoers who come in behind you will take your place if you don’t move forward when the line does.

Barr’s version of The Artist is Present is hardly an accurate record of the performance, but it perfectly captures the frustration which often accompanies a trip to the always-crowded Museum of Modern Art. The crowds were especially thick during Abramovic’s retrospective, which received more than its fare share of press coverage for its inclusion of nude performers and for Abramovic’s incredible feat of endurance—she sat at that table in the atrium every day, all day, for the entire duration of the show (with rare exceptions).

Barr’s game draws our attention to the endurance of the other participants in The Artist is Present. More forcefully, perhaps, it illuminates the much more banal, and certainly less celebrated, acts of endurance performed by visitors to MoMA and other popular museums every day. Ordinary people show up, pay their $25 fees, and patiently—because it requires so much patience—wait their turns to see some of the greatest art ever created; and sometimes, even, some not-so-great art.