It’s a subdued Martin Luther King Day in the US, and we take a bus across town to visit MoMA. I haven’t been to the modern art museum in New York since before my children were born and this feels like the week for it. Everyone is jittery about the inauguration on Wednesday, about news of the Covid death count hitting 400,000 in the US and about American democracy under strain. Perhaps art will lift us.
It is odd to get cabin fever in a city of 8.5 million people, but that is how New York feels right now; stagnant, airless, expectant. A friend recently flew to LA for work, something I used to hate and now regard with intense jealousy. I turn to my sluggish children, complaining their legs hurt before we’ve even reached the museum, and give them a version of the pep talk about New York from the end of Meet Me in St Louis: “Everybody dreams of going there, but we’re luckier than lots of families because we’re really going!” Or in our case, we’re already here. “Aren’t we lucky?” I trill. Flat looks of contempt all round and a refusal to go up the stairs to look at the impressionists.
There are other things to enjoy at MoMA. The half-tyre thing embedded in the floor with bottles on top of it. The shiny prism things hanging off the ceiling. The rock things in a heap. The fibreglass mermaid. We stop in front of a large screen and too late I remember the effect of video installation on my wellbeing. This one features a two-second clip of Wonder Woman – Linda Carter’s original from the 80s TV show – stepping forward and back, over and over on a loop. My children stop, excited, before getting the measure of the thing and turning to me in baffled rage. “What is this?” they demand. I shrug. Things repeat; the fictions we tell ourselves doom us to endless circularity; even superheroes get stuck in a rut. “What can I tell you, it’s art.”
Tuesday
It’s a week of renewal, hope, regeneration and moving on, by which, of course, I refer not to the inauguration of Joe Biden but to Ben Affleck throwing out a lifesize cardboard cutout of his ex-girlfriend, Ana de Armas. As the Daily Mail reports on Tuesday, after happening upon the event via long lens, the cardboard figure is so awkward a shape for general rubbish disposal that it takes “two grown men” – neither of them Affleck, although for a short, heady period there is speculation one might be his brother Casey (it isn’t) – to get rid of it.
It is the second story of the week to feature a middle-aged male movie star gone to seed, the other, of course, being Russell Crowe, who became tetchy with a fan on Twitter after he criticised Crowe’s almost 20-year-old movie Master and Commander. It’s a great movie and I’m 100% Team Crowe, who when photographed in Sydney, heaving himself about the tennis court, has – forgive me – a vague look of Steffi Graff about him that I’ve never quite been able to resist. If not entirely in on the joke, Crowe is at least self-mocking enough to absorb it.
Affleck, on the other hand, seems a man not remotely in touch with his preposterousness. Mocked for looking unhappy in trunks or carrying a tray of iced coffees from Dunkin’ Donuts with insufficient dignity, he is condemned to serve out his days as the butt of endless dopey memes. You could, if you tried hard, probably work up some observations about the American soul via Affleck, but perhaps that’s one to park for less feverish times.
Monday
It’s a subdued Martin Luther King Day in the US, and we take a bus across town to visit MoMA. I haven’t been to the modern art museum in New York since before my children were born and this feels like the week for it. Everyone is jittery about the inauguration on Wednesday, about news of the Covid death count hitting 400,000 in the US and about American democracy under strain. Perhaps art will lift us.
It is odd to get cabin fever in a city of 8.5 million people, but that is how New York feels right now; stagnant, airless, expectant. A friend recently flew to LA for work, something I used to hate and now regard with intense jealousy. I turn to my sluggish children, complaining their legs hurt before we’ve even reached the museum, and give them a version of the pep talk about New York from the end of Meet Me in St Louis: “Everybody dreams of going there, but we’re luckier than lots of families because we’re really going!” Or in our case, we’re already here. “Aren’t we lucky?” I trill. Flat looks of contempt all round and a refusal to go up the stairs to look at the impressionists.
There are other things to enjoy at MoMA. The half-tyre thing embedded in the floor with bottles on top of it. The shiny prism things hanging off the ceiling. The rock things in a heap. The fibreglass mermaid. We stop in front of a large screen and too late I remember the effect of video installation on my wellbeing. This one features a two-second clip of Wonder Woman – Linda Carter’s original from the 80s TV show – stepping forward and back, over and over on a loop. My children stop, excited, before getting the measure of the thing and turning to me in baffled rage. “What is this?” they demand. I shrug. Things repeat; the fictions we tell ourselves doom us to endless circularity; even superheroes get stuck in a rut. “What can I tell you, it’s art.”
Tuesday
It’s a week of renewal, hope, regeneration and moving on, by which, of course, I refer not to the inauguration of Joe Biden but to Ben Affleck throwing out a lifesize cardboard cutout of his ex-girlfriend, Ana de Armas. As the Daily Mail reports on Tuesday, after happening upon the event via long lens, the cardboard figure is so awkward a shape for general rubbish disposal that it takes “two grown men” – neither of them Affleck, although for a short, heady period there is speculation one might be his brother Casey (it isn’t) – to get rid of it.
It is the second story of the week to feature a middle-aged male movie star gone to seed, the other, of course, being Russell Crowe, who became tetchy with a fan on Twitter after he criticised Crowe’s almost 20-year-old movie Master and Commander. It’s a great movie and I’m 100% Team Crowe, who when photographed in Sydney, heaving himself about the tennis court, has – forgive me – a vague look of Steffi Graff about him that I’ve never quite been able to resist. If not entirely in on the joke, Crowe is at least self-mocking enough to absorb it.
Affleck, on the other hand, seems a man not remotely in touch with his preposterousness. Mocked for looking unhappy in trunks or carrying a tray of iced coffees from Dunkin’ Donuts with insufficient dignity, he is condemned to serve out his days as the butt of endless dopey memes. You could, if you tried hard, probably work up some observations about the American soul via Affleck, but perhaps that’s one to park for less feverish times.