Memoirous

Rarely have I walked into a room where I felt an emotional coldness, a sense of dread, abandon all hope. Except perhaps a haunted house. Through the ages there have been rooms. The grand duke Franz Ferdinand had a room devoted to his game hunting skills. Approximately 100,000 trophies were on exhibit at his Bohemian castle. Wealthy industrialists have sought to have rooms reconstructed after the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Henry Clay Frick who made his money from coke (coal) had installed in his Fifth Avenue mansion panels painted by Fragonard, “The Cycle of Love”, with a drawing room designed around them in 1915/16. The boiseries, or painted wall panels, were designed and executed in Paris by Auguste Decour in the Louis XVI style. There have been rooms inspired by Japanese aesthetics or by nature. Frank Lloyd Wright designed his house/studio around a willow tree that would eventually “grow” in the front entryway. Indeed one can easily identify a Wright ro...

On vacation (a couple of weeks ago, just now getting my land legs) I probably took in 7 or 8 museums a day. Literally. This is easy to do in New York City and Washington DC. There might be one or two we missed. Maybe. So in my crazy circuit of museum hopping (it’s all a blur) we were in the Hirshhorn Museum—one of the Smithsonians—and stumbled into an exhibit on famous Chinese artist and activist Weiwei “According to What?” Exactly—according to what? There was a sandbox of sunflower seeds, or an installation consisting of a conflagration of sand crabs, like scarabs, flamingo pink and shrimp gray, massed up in a small gallery room. It was the kind of art that makes one question: What is art?  It provokes the response—I could do that or what makes Weiwei so great. But, as one turns corners in the gallery, you keep running into things that boggle the mind, until even your own perspective is skewed. His box sculptures are out of the box. His world view is outside ...