STILL LIFE WITH TOURISTS

Quick: Macy's or the Museum?

As a New Yorker, I'd like to thank the tourists who shell out anywhere from $17 to $30 apiece for visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art just so we locals can fork over a penny if that's all we feel like doing. Culture doesn't come cheap, y'know, and you out-of-towners help to ease the fiscal burden of living here.

The accountants art historians who run the MMA have, over time, learned the two kinds of shows that will further boost their coffers: fashion exhibits and dead A-list artists. This summer they offered a double-header: Karl Lagerfeld and Vincent Van Gogh.

Unless you're in the fashion world or run a museum, nobody really considers Karl Lagerfeld an artist. He designed clothes. Clothes are nice, but I wouldn't necessarily consider them frame-worthy.

Sure, these guys are definitely equals.

But Van Gogh -- now there's an artist, one who, as the saccharine song goes, suffered for his sanity (much as I suffered through mine whenever it turned up on the radio). The only thing Lagerfeld suffered for was wearing shirts with neck-choking collars. 

Now, any Van Gogh show is going to create a big noise. But this one is the first to focus solely on his paintings of cypress trees. This exhibit, then, is a happening -- as well as a show guaranteed to draw in the hoi-polloi who would otherwise be more likely to pay the same amount of money to get their photo taken with Mickey Mouse in Times Square.

There's nothing like seeing "The Starry Night"
in person.

My wife and I had been interested in seeing the exhibition since it opened over the spring but waited until last Friday to finally pull the trigger. Shows with the cachet of "Van Gogh's Cypresses" always attract thousands of visitors, particularly early on, so we figured -- make that hoped -- that anyone who wanted to see it already had. Unfortunately, too many other people were hoping the same thing.

The kind of visitors who were there can be divided into two groups: those who want to appreciate the paintings they've only seen reproduced in books, and those who take pictures of them. All of them. And, to doubly prove it, taking selfies in front of them. Call me a snob, but the worst thing about museums is that they're open to the public. I wish I were crazy over Greek artifacts -- nobody visits that area of Met.

Just to bug the owners, I got a photo of it from
Wikipedia. Sue me!

One Van Gogh painting, "A Wheat Field with Cypresses", had a guard nearby to prevent any picture-snapping. Its owner doesn't want anybody to "own" it as well, I suppose. (It reminded me of obsessive film-collectors who have the one surviving print of a movie but won't let anyone see it.) Not surprisingly, "A Wheat Field with Cypresses" was one of the few works you could actually get a look at. What good is a Van Gogh if you can't prove you saw it?

"Van Gogh's Cypresses" will be on display at the Met until August 27. If you plan on visiting, go early. Just for fun, photobomb everyone taking selfies. When they complain, shut them down with, "For what I paid to get in here, I can do whatever the hell I want!" It's the New York way.

                                                           ***********