Red Hot MoMA

I have always had a love/hate relationship with New York’s Museum of Modern Art. I’ve even held memberships to MoMA several times (right now I have one) but I usually let them lapse because I get so tired of the damn pretentious elitism of the place and the constant battering at the doors of my meager income for donations. To top it off they also sell, or at least supply, my name and address to every other cultural institution on the East Coast causing a deluge of mail, each one pleading their individual cause and the dire need for me to send them money. Even so, I must confess, once in a while MoMA does something so right that I fling myself inside over and over until surfeited with art; somewhat like eating too many burritos at a Mexican restaurant (including numerous margaritas…with salt).

This year’s blockbuster consists of only 24 paintings but almost any one of them could be enough to send you home tapping your impressionistic toes. Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night is the pretentious (see?) name of this exhibition and it is nothing short of thrilling. You’ve probably seen all the paintings, if only on postcards, and I’m afraid I must confess to owning a coffee cup, a mug really, with a “Starry Night” motif. But in the flesh these paintings live and breathe and agonize. You can’t help being trapped in Van Gogh’s world of beauty, ugliness and madness unless your taste in art is primarily limited to the museum shop.

My cynical soul always cries out to the cynical souls who bring exhibitions like this together. Admission to MoMA for an adult is $20. I wonder how much that translates into the Euros of 1893. Poor Van Gogh never sold a painting in his life and now they seem to get passed around for gazillions about every 20 years or so. This show should be free (yeah, like that’s ever gonna happen) but I set my basic communism aside for shows like this one. My esthetic senses deserve the break and it gets me over the hump of what passes for “modern art” nowadays, but don’t get me started on the commerce behind it all and the victimization of its collectors. So I will proceed cautiously in these shallow waters because, after all, I really do like my coffee mug. It’s a good size, the handle fits my fingers nicely and the colors are really pretty.