Day 175…
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has reopened and is free to all through September 27. You need to make an online reservation for timed entry, but I think you can also just show up on a standby basis.
Michael and I have been members of several museums around the city for years. With a membership, you can pretty much jump the line these days and get in whenever you like. Yesterday at MOMA, there was nobody waiting to get in and maybe a total of 7 people visiting. Guards outnumbered patrons by a sizable margin.
It’s not going to last very long, but the experience of having the place to yourself is one that shouldn’t be missed. There is always a crowd around some of their more famous masterpieces such as Van Gogh’s Starry Night, but yesterday, I had it, as well as the other magnificent paintings surrounding it, completely to myself.
In a strange sort of way, the lack of attention to Starry Night humanizes it. After all, it’s just daubs of paint on a piece of stretched canvas. Seeing Starry Night hanging on the wall across a fairly vast empty room makes it easier to imagine the man who painted it. It seems more ordinary when there aren’t throngs of people adoring it and taking pictures in front of it. No less remarkable a painting, certainly, but one that seems real - created by a living breathing person.
I’ve found that when famous people are away from the crowds of people who adore them, they become, well, ordinary. The energy of a crowd focusing all of its attention on one person magnifies that one person into something else.
Sharon Stone came backstage once when I was doing Gypsy with Bernadette Peters. She and whoever she was with were waiting onstage and quietly chatting and I actually didn’t recognize her. I walked over to them to ask who they were there to see and something happened. She immediately changed. She… turned on. She became Sharon Stone.
I took her back to see Bernadette and every single other person backstage noticed her. There was an energy going back and forth between her and all of us looking at her that wasn’t there when she was on her own.
The same thing, I think, happens to certain works of art. They get altered by the attention paid to them.
The Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris is a perfect example. It is a fairly small painting, but it is set by itself in a room with a massive amount of protection around it. It’s actually in a vault. Thousands of people crowd in every day to look at it. It is an event. Everyone is excited to see it in person, and that excitement becomes part of the experience of the work. It’s almost impossible to just look at the painting through the carnival surrounding it. That same thing happens around Starry Night, albeit at not quite so high a level.
Yesterday, though, I was allowed to be alone with it and my experience of it was very different.
There is a beautiful biography of Vincent Van Gogh called Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Reading that as well as the letters between him and his brother Theo really made me look at his work more closely than I had in the past.
Working in Europe these many years, I have been able to travel to most of the places where he lived and worked. Zundert, the small town in the Netherlands where he was born. The Westerkerk church in Amsterdam that he occasionally attended. The apartments in Paris and London where he lived while he worked in galleries, the French town of Arles where he shared a house with the painter Paul Gaugin for a short while and painted his famous sunflowers, the asylum in Saint-Remy where he battled depression and painted Starry Night and the Auvers-sur-Oise town cemetery where he and his brother are buried.
That he died before he experienced any success whatsoever has always seemed to me unbearably tragic. There is an episode of the British Sci-Fi series Doctor Who, where the Doctor takes Vincent Van Gogh into the future to a museum where his work is hanging. Van Gogh sees all of the people admiring his work. He sees it get… larger… under the frenzy of their attention. His sees his work transform from daubs of paint on the canvas into… something else. It always makes me weep.
Perhaps it was watching the President lie through the Republican National Convention while his family rallied around him and lied themselves, but something has changed for me in regard to how I see this Administration.
He and it look smaller.
It’s impossible to take anything he says seriously. We have all spent too much energy fighting his lies when really, all along, we should have just been concentrating on the truth.
His tweet, yesterday, made me laugh out loud.
Michael Schmidt’s new book Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President has just hit the bookstores. One of the revelations in the book was about an unscheduled visit by the President to Walter Reed Hospital back in November. The visit was described by the White House at the time as merely a part of his usual annual check-up. The fact that it hadn’t been previously announced and that it was separate from the rest of his exam raised questions at the time, but it was all downplayed by the White House.
In his new book, Schmidt reveals that the Vice-President was put on alert that he might need to assume the Presidency temporarily should the President have needed to go under anesthesia during that visit. There was more to it than the White House admitted. There was no discussion, however, about what exactly might have been going on health-wise.
So, yesterday, the President tweets, "It never ends! Now they are trying to say that your favorite President, me, went to Walter Reed Medical Center, having suffered a series of mini-strokes. Never happened to THIS candidate - FAKE NEWS."
Well up to that point, nobody had said anything about him possibly suffering a series of mini-strokes. Michael Schmidt certainly never mentioned it.
What do we know about this President? He lies about everything. Whatever he says, therefore, is a lie. A revelation that might already be yesterday’s news today, now has a whole new life. We will all now be forever wondering about whether President, thanks to the President’s tweet, suffered a series of mini-strokes.
It makes one wonder anew about things like the President needing to use a second hand to lift a glass of water to his mouth during one of his rallies and his difficulty in walking down a simple ramp at West Point. Hmm.
At the moment, what is giving the President his power is the attention we are giving him. He is doing everything he can to stir up fear and anxiety so that we then turn to him to solve it. Hitler did the same thing in Germany.
There is an episode of the classic Star Trek series where the crew of the enterprise are locked in battle on a planet with the Klingons. Unbeknownst to both sides is that there is an alien presence who is feeding off of their anger and aggression. This alien is driving the two sides to fight each other so that it can sate itself.
The alien is ultimately driven off when both the Enterprise crew and the Klingons realize what’s going on and join together. They laugh at it. In the absence of aggression and fear, the alien cannot survive. It leaves.
We have the power to do the same thing.
Nobody was interested in the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh while he was alive. They were considered messy, amateurish and garish. After his death, his brother Theo relentlessly promoted them and taught people how to look at them. Within a short time, people started to see in them what Theo saw. Van Gogh’s reputation began to grow.
Attention started being paid to his work and the work grew in perceived size. The more people started admiring them, the larger they got. They are now entirely something else than what they once were. They aren’t real in our perception. Prices of them are so high that they seem… other, in some way. Supernatural. Even though that what they really still are, are just daubs of paint on some cheap stretched canvas.
The President is not some great exalted being. We are making him that, by giving him all of this attention. We are making him that by panicking and cringing in fear every time he speaks.
We need to stop expecting him to tell the truth and just ignore everything that he’s saying. To defeat him, we just need to band together and laugh at him.
The people around the President are the ones who are really dangerous but cut off the head and the rest will soon wither.
I think I am going to go back downtown and have another look at those glorious splatters of paint. There is something truly awe-inspiring about what Vincent Van Gogh was able to do.
His work may just be paintings and drawings hanging on a wall, but they do have real magic in them.
And we could all use some magic.
What a treat enjoying these creative beauties all to yourself - a rare opportunity. Love the way you’ve woven various stories and the attention given to these works of art to Trump feeds and needs!
I believe in magic
got me through my childhood....
yes, we seem to have it now
can stand before a masterpiece
all by ourselves
so we can connect
to the master pieces we are
all together
Read Dear Theo... the letters between Van Gough and his brother
his words themselves are strokes of he painting
xx