I spent my Saturday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (I think it's safe to call it the first of many Saturdays spent there, since it's a ten-minute walk from my new apartment.) I patronized the new stuff first: I loved John Baldessari's work for its clearly sarcastic overtones, wondered if Charles Rohlfs' wife and kids secretly hated him for filling their home with gorgeously designed yet horrifically uncomfortable-looking furniture, and spent hours -- literally hours -- wandering around the New American Wing and its dozens of new Period Rooms.
I then visited my old favorites -- the sculpture courts, the roof garden where I became a real New Yorker (which is getting a blog post of its own next week), and the upstairs gallery full of portraits of creepy-looking children. I also got in some quality time with my sketchbook:
For the first time ever, my work wasn't photographed by any tourists. (Not to my knowledge, anyway.) Instead, random visitors kept asking me questions about the artwork I was sketching. By closing time, I had explained why Roman sculptures don't have carved pupils and irises to a young couple, retold the Perseus myth to a little girl, gave some high schoolers a lecture on the classical ideal of female beauty, and explained to a young man why the boobs looked weird on the statue of the muse. I have no idea why people thought I knew the answers to their questions; I just had one of those faces today, I guess.
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