Going to the Met on a Rainy Saturday afternoon

The Metropolitan art museum in New York City, for a tourist on a rainy day, is an unsettling contradiction of context and content. The first impression is the enormous numbers of people. The streets had been generally quiet; the drizzly walk through Central Park had been almost solitaire. But as we entered that grand foyer and shook off our rain jackets, we saw what we imagined must be all of New York City. This is where they were hiding out. This is where they came to regroup on a drizzly weekend afternoon when there were no deals to pursue. Or, perhaps, these were all the tourists, like us, who had gotten there only hours before.
We took our first steps through the Egyptian artifact exhibit. And the numbers of others were there around us as well. We walked past spacious glass cases of 4000 year old statues and hieroglyphics, massive stone sarcophagi and tiny earthen burial urns, enormous ancient columns now become obelisks. The number of profound artifacts was alone staggering. But, the others brazed past us as if they already understood far more than the tiny wall descriptions could explain. They walked past as if they were in any other corridor on the planet, as if in part Egypt was another local borough on the way to a better knish. They didn't walk past as if they didn't care, nor as if they had studied these ancient works sufficiently in the past for their own tastes, but they walked past as if they had somewhere else to be, as if the industrious Egyptians would absolutely understand that this wasn't a time for remembering specifically but was rather a time to be living and moving freely in concert with the past, in concert with a place and time that was completely other. It was as if the exhibit was not only real and significant, but significantly real and mundane.
And then the corridor turned into a massive open atrium. Here the crowds stopped. I saw people sit, even recline. I saw couples ask strangers to take their picture. In the middle of this enormous greenhouse was, not another artifact, but a fully realized ancient stone temple. Within a city founded less than 400 years ago, stood a piece of architecture showing 2021 years of culture, culture change, weathering, use, and decay. The informational descriptions were extremely sparse, but they described how this temple had been chosen by New York as a gift from a country that couldn't afford its preservation.
It's a museum in a town so powerful and wealthy that it can recreate the accomplishments of whole civilizations and make them its own through acquisition and default. But it's a museum in a town so generous that it gives this history to its citizens with an astonishing level of access - these ancient stones could be touched and encountered and experienced in every way.
We moved on through this staggeringly enormous museum, through the "arms and armor" exhibit, showcasing more suits of horse and rider armor than almost all medieval kingdoms owned. Pistols and rifles were displayed in their extreme elegance and ornament as if to reclaim their notoriety from their intended use to some level of much more influence.
We passed by familiar exterior windows and awnings and entered a fully rebuilt living room rescued from a demolished home by Frank Lloyd Wright. The presentation was not dissimilar to the Egyptian temple in its anachronism. A McKim Mead & White stair and foyer was similarly displayed, as if the very experience of these rooms was the same as a painting that could be matted, framed, and hung on a wall in another, bigger, succeeding, more contemporary room.
The cafeteria had a displaced Episcopal pulpit, even a whole transplanted classical façade at the far end. A Greek garden was recreated with reclining statues and water features. Stained glass lit in windowless walls. Rooms were divided by enormous ancient iron gates.
So, it became a theme. A history of human civilization captured and encountered within the rooms and corridors of a state institution. Bizarre and profound. But even with this expectation, the American furniture exhibit was a surprise. Through rows and rows of glassed cases, the Met created an Ikea of antique furniture history. I expected to see price-check scanners at the centers of the aisles. There seemed to be some Darwinian progression of the species on display through the glass cases, one set next to the next. It was such a massive room, with the aesthetics of a Target store, and so uninteresting and so un-interactive that fortunately we were able to move on to the American painters gallery.
American painting galleries are always a surprise to me, and always entertaining. While some names are recognizable, I'm consistently encouraged by the number of unknown artists who produced so many pieces of work of comparable artistry and ingenuity, of such variety of subject, over such a narrow period of time. It gives me perspective that the handful of artists who are singled out as exceptional or popular today will be mingled in a retrospective in the future with dozens of their contemporaries for an exhibit that demonstrates their unknowing cooperation within the whole of an era.
So, an unsettling experience all around. An astounding way to spend a rainy vacation afternoon after the pop museums have closed and an astounding look at the lengths New York docents will go to capture their patrons' imaginations. What we did see is many people in conversations among the art. Perhaps they were conversations like this one, conversations beyond the art as artifact; I think many were. But maybe New Yorkers are used to that.