I spent Friday evening at MOMA viewing three shows which I’ll briefly cover here – Design and the Elastic Mind had a few things in it that I liked but the rest of the show looked like a free for all – a lot of work but no real emotional connection to most of it. What I did like was the “New City” installation which has it’s own Mini Theatre.

This was an image shown at the Theatre installation which people had to sit or lie down to fully view. I liked it though I’m not sure what it was actually trying to say (or was it anything worth saying ….don’t know). At any rate, most of the works in this show, while many have merit, don’t really tell much of a cohesive story – that’s probably more the fault of the curator than anything else.

Color Wheel also wasn’t a very good show except for a few pieces of work in it like the two paintings of Blinky Palermo, a German artist who died way too young, in 1977 at the age of 34. Too bad, the world lost a great artist.

Blinky Palermo, Untitled, 1969

Considering that this show was about the Color Wheel, and Color, in general, it was amazing to me how superficial the treatment of color was for most of the artists in the show. Blinky Palermo was only artist, I saw, who actually “did” something with the color – the color poped out at me and there was an intense “push-pull” that worked better, to me, than Hans Hoffman.

I also liked, but not as much, Jim Dine’s The Studio (below) but again, the treatment of color was more superfacial – but atleast there was some real feeling there – based on an emotial experience Dine had when he was younger.

Lucien Freud’s Etchings show, closing on Monday, was a disappointment – not that his work isn’t great, or worth seeing, but while I saw some interesting work, his limitations as an artist are also clear – he’s struggling with everything – and the paintings show it (maybe that’s what people like about it – but I think Lucien Freud takes the human being and makes it ugly and repulsive but somehow, manages to get you to look at it anyway.  However, didn’t Francis Bacon do the same thing, but better?

Among the show’s best piece is “Bella” painted in 1981 (below) and “Man with a Blue Scarf” painted in 2004 (also see below).

The rest of the etchings are superb – but I can’t help but feel the struggle, which in most cases, doesn’t really help me. The Man with a Blue Scarf probably had the brightest palette of any of his paintings – and yet, it too is subdued. I wonder what he’s afraid of (or maybe it’s a Freudian Slip).

At any rate, when I left MOMA (did buy a sketchbook in the Design Store) it was still raining hard and on my way home I was Tweeting (on Twitter) just how impersonal and cold a place MOMA is – where did didn’t need to be – the IAC Building designed by Frank Gehrys (see below) is a modern building and yet, much warmer to be in – a great piece of Art and an amazing building with some amazing capacities:

For one thing, the “windows” change color and transparency based on the time of day – also there age giant video screens inside and a lot of really good space and energy.

But MOMA is, for all it’s space, a building all about Process – and the feeling is, for me, of people being “herded” in and around the building – treated almost like “sheep” who are being ready to be slaughtered; that’s why I don’t enjoy going to MOMA that much, it feel dehumanizing, somehow, to be treated like a like part of a mob, that needs to be “regimented” and directed.

And while we’re at it, the Whitney Museum of American Art is also a modern building but feels a lot more plesent and human to be in. Like I said, MOMA is impresonal and cold – and the art, I feel, is colored by that – but it didn’t need to be that way.

Just because a building or a work of Art is Modern, that doesn’t mean it has to be cold, impersonal or devoid of human feeling.