Attention Span

Mine isn't all that great, having grown up with 30 minute television shows and 3 minute pop songs. Now, as an adult, I've got the MacBookiPadiPhone set of distractions, delivering the world to me in tidbit size servings. The only thing I can concentrate on indefinitely is editing a photo. It must involve a different part of my brain.

Not so the woman above, who is completely engaged with this floral piece. Below, some very warm flowers compete with a cool Dan Flavin neon tube. I like Flavin's stuff. It's as much about the space around the tube and what you can do to it as the neon bulb itself.                          

MoMA

Field trip yesterday to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. OMG was the city crowded. I don't remember this from when I was a child and a teen here. The subway line we needed to go from Penn Station to the museum was out of service so we had to walk up 6th Avenue past Radio City Music Hall and the back side of Rockefeller Center.  We could have used a bull whip to get through. Same when we got back to Penn on the way home, when people were emptying out of the city. Penn Station's current incarnation is horribly designed and a few hundred people were trying to press through a single doorway onto the platform for the train to New Jersey. Mrs. C felt in serious danger of being trampled at a couple of points.

I like to take photographs in art museums but there is nothing interesting in photographing the artworks. The fun part is the architecture, people interacting with the art and people taking pictures of the art on their phones. Starry Night, anyone? Or can anyone guess the neighborhood, if that's the right word, in the bottom photo? We've walked through it.

Home tonight.         

At The National Gallery

When I'm in Washington, I always pay a visit to the National Gallery of Art. There are two buildings. The older, neoclassical West Building has works through roughly the end on the 19th Century. The East Building has the modern stuff. A tunnel that connects them contains a waterfall and window shown at the bottom. The top and middle images show a work by Dan Flavin, an artist whose medium was neon tubes.

The East Building makes my eyes and brain work hard. After crossing the tunnel, I looked at some 16th and 17th Century Dutch painting in the East Building. Hardly lightweight art but much more soothing.

There are other pictures I took at the National Gallery on Flickr here.

TOMORROW: Back to The Lou.