We had a group function last night at the Museum of Modern Art. It's about 10 blocks north of the office, so we decided to walk up there. That sounds OK, except it was -15 outside, so we made it a very brisk walk indeed! There was also a fairly decent wind cutting down the streets, so it made it all the colder. Apparently, there was an Arctic front which came down in the past day or two. According to the weather reports, it's the coldest New York's been for three years. Anyway, I digress...
We had about 50 people at the event at MoMA (the museum) and we were broken into teams for a treasure hunt. Each team was given four questions relating to different pieces of art on display. This was the first hint that not everthing was above board.
Obviously, as soon as the teams were given their questions, there was a mad rush to get into the museum and find the pieces of art we were looking for. MoMA's 7 storeys tall with priceless pieces of art from artists like van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Cézanne, Matisse and Dali. According to Wikipedia, MoMA is "considered by many to have the best collection of modern Western masterpieces in the world, MoMA's holdings include more than 150,000 individual pieces in addition to approximately 22,000 films and 4 million film stills." Many pieces are worth millions of dollars each; and we ran past the lot of them!
We saw people admiring paintings, taking photos, making sketches, considering them from different angles and trying to determine their underlying meanings. If it wasn't a painting on our list, it might as well not be there at all. I was totally amazed at the collection of art on display. I don't follow art closely, but there were so many famous pieces I recognised, I was blown away. I'll probably go back quite soon to have a proper look through the museum.
In all, we spent about 15 minutes going through MoMA. The good news is that our team was the second one to take the completed answers back, but the first one to return it correctly comleted, so we won! It felt kind of bad that we spent so little time in a place which was obviously so amazing. Am I going to hell? If I go back and actually look at the exhibits next time, does that make it ok?
I've got a few bits and pieces which I need to put up on the blog, so stay tuned for the omnibus update!
