Monday, December 29, 2008

The Contemporary Jewish Museum: huh?

I'm exhausted.

From talking to other people, I've heard that some Moms are kind of mellow, let's-hang-out-and-have-tea Moms. Not mine. Mine is more of a how-many-things-can-you-fit-in-one-day Mom. Consequently, in the past few days, I've been to the Asian Art Museum, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, a couple of restaurants, and so on, and so on. It's nice being back at work today and getting a break.

This brings me to the Contemporary Jewish Museum. It's very strange.


It's gotten far more attention for the architecture - which is essentially a Daniel Libeskind tilted cube shoved down into a Willis Polk power station from the turn of the century - than anything inside. I guess that's to be expected, given Libeskind's status.

But once you get inside, there's not much there. On the ground floor, there's an exhibition documenting Warhol's Ten Portraits of Jews in the Twentieth Century, and that's fine, but isn't everyone a little burned out on Warhol? I am. On the second floor, there's an exhibit called In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis, which had a couple of cool pieces, I guess, but didn't do much for me overall.

In the main room, the biggest part of the tilted cube, there's nothing. Well, nothing visual. There's a "sound exhibition" that mostly echoed all over the oddly-shaped room and would have been better on an iPod.

Hey, I'm no art critic. Maybe I'm not sophisticated enough to appreciate what's going on here, but to me, it seemed like a building looking for something to house. I'm also not Jewish, so I don't know if that makes any difference.

She's leaving tomorrow. My life will return to whatever level of normal it was before, I assume.

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