News You Can Bruise for 2007 February 3

Hadn't been to the MoMA before because I dislike paying $20 to go to a museum. I missed the "Dada at MoMA" exhibit because of that. Anyway, Andy came up with a scheme to get us in for free, and today we went together. Man, a lot of that stuff was lousy. There should be tighter standards for terms of art like "embedded". But the top floor made up for it with a Paul Klee room, some Picasso, and the first Duchamp I've seen in person. The Duchamp plaque gave the standard (false) story of Three Standard Stoppages (contra), but I've long since given up on expecting New York museums to change their signage in response to Stephen Jay Gould articles.

Also, you know Alberto Giacometti? He did those hideous (not in a good way) bumpy sculptures of really elongated figures. I hate those suckers, and they're in every single museum (Andy commented on this as well). And yet, MoMA has what's probably my favorite sculpture of all time, The Palace at 4 A.M., and it turns out that was done by Alberto Giacometti! The mind boggles!

TPa4AM is much cooler in person than in a dinky black-and-white photograph reproduced in an art book you saw in high school. I always thought it was a metal sculpture, but it's wood, which is great. And—let's be clear—it's got a pterodactyl.

PS: The Persistence of Memory is tiny! How did Dali cram all that graham, where graham=detail?