Day Six: Opposite Ends of the Spectrum
Today we started by going to Central Park. We did a walking tour of the park, stopping twice for two halves of a lovely picnic in the park. Central Park is truly an amazing place. It’s huge, but engineered to be at turns expansive and intimate. The best part, of course, was not the park, but the people, and on the Sunday of Labour Day weekend, the place was hopping with people, which made the experience all the better.
After having walked the length of the park (no small feat) with so many detours back and forth that we probably really walked it about 3 times, we were resting our feet and trying to decide what to do next when I noticed that we weren’t that far from the Guggenheim. With our feet as sore as they were, it was crazy talk to decide to go to a museum, but we did anyway!
The Guggenheim was disappointing at first, because the outside was completely obscured by scaffolding and netting, but then we got inside and the architectural design of the building just blew us away. Looking straight up from the lobby is really breathtaking, and so is much of the art.
There is a lot of art at the Guggenheim that is probably too …. advanced for Timmi and me. There are a lot of pieces of art in the current exhibition that remind me of the episode of the Simpsons when Barney’s girlfriend Yoko orders “A single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man’s hat.” There were paintings composed entirely of the colour black, or installation sculpture consisting only of 6 fluorescent lightbulbs in a semi circle. Interesting, but not very accessible.
Then we got to the permanent collection on the second floor and we walked around simply amazed at the collection. We left incredibly happy that we took our crazy detour, and if our feet were a little sore, the rest of us was happy.