My NY-LON: The Space-Time Traveling Museum

February 2016
My birthday started as many February mornings in New York do, chilly and snow-covered with gusty winds and unsettling grey skies that make you want to stay indoors.  I, however, had planned a day out of luxurious museum-going in Manhattan. I say luxurious because I intended to go by myself, meaning I could indulge in whichever displays struck me and neglect others without having to worry about what a museum buddy might be into.  I could sit in front of painting for an hour if I liked, read a label three times, stop for coffee when fatigue set in (or more probably glass of wine), all without having to engage in any conversations about historic significance, artistic intent, or effective of design; discussions that inevitably require me to swap out my curious visitor’s hat for the cap and gown of a museum-professional. 

My day of museuming (yes, I will use that as a verb) was also going to be luxurious because I had specifically selected the most bourgeois museum in New York I could find: the Neue Gallerie.  My hope was that my visit would transport me back to Vienna, a city where I’d studied history, art, and theater while in university.  I was yearning for a little birthday escape to stretch my perspective, and while weekend getaways to continental cities were relatively quick and affordable while I lived in the UK, now in New York the most practical option for a trip ‘abroad’ seemed to be to a museum -- sorry I’m not going to Montreal in February.  After all, museums are unmatched in their ability to transport us to faraway places populated by unfamiliar people -- the very things I love most about traveling. 

By the time I reached the Upper Eastside in the late morning, the buildings along 5th Avenue looked like a row of sugar dusted petite-fours in a bakery shop window. The Neue Gallerie’s dusty pink walls, frosted with fresh snow, looked particularly toothsome.  I followed an older couple bundled awkwardly against the cold through the museum’s entrance,  checked my heavy coat and bag, and was delighted to learn that admission (usually $20) was free for the day. I then climbed a grand staircase to the galleries, ready to spend the next few hours in silent conversation with works of Schiele, Klimt, and Kokoschka. Instead I found myself crammed into a single, tiny gallery where uniformed attendants out-numbered visitors.  Bewildered, I stepped out in to the hallway again to look around, and then saw that signs across each doorway announcing that the galleries were closed for install. How did I miss that when perusing the gallery’s website earlier that morning?  Could there really be only one small gallery open for all these expectant visitors?* I gazed around for a few minutes, but gave up on competing for the personal space I needed to appreciate one of the dozen pieces on display.  In an attempt to relieve my disappointment, resorted to an earlier-than expected, but equally refreshing, glass of wine in Café Sabarksy.

Luckily for me, the Neue Gallerie sits directly across the street from the Metropolitan Museum, so after a long walk through Central Park, I succumbed to plan B: an afternoon pilgrimage to one of the world’s finest cultural institutions.  To my utter delight and relief, the Met wasn’t mobbed with crowds as it’s always been when I’ve visited before. Rather, it offered a labyrinth of curiously quiet galleries and secreted nooks where I lost myself for the next four hours.  I wandered through the familiar halls of reconstructed European manor houses, marveled at detailed Mughal paintings, and joined a tour of the Arms and Armor gallery that took me through five hundred years of weaponry spanning three continents.

  I couldn’t go to Vienna for my birthday weekend, but at the Met I could admire a full bard of 16th century Germanic armor, the likes of which is not found anywhere else on this continent.

Here’s an admission: when I first moved to New York and asked people to name their favorite local museum, I’d roll my eyes imperceptibly when they’d tell me the Met. “How predictable,” I’d think, “how very uninspired.”  I felt the same while living in London when people told me that the British Museum was their favorite museum.  Both the Met and the British Museum are behemoth, internationally- heralded institutions that are easy choices for world’s favorite museum. The breadth and standard of their encyclopedic collections are hard to compete with, as are the quality of their exhibitions and the eye-widening impact of their cathedral-like entrances.   Whereas the British Museum has a perceptible aura of lofty wisdom, the Met’s glamour is contagious.  We feel smarter just by entering the British Museum; webecome more attractive by visiting the Met.

After this recent birthday visit to the Met, I’m equally as smitten.

My birthday visit to the Met strengthened my conviction that museums’ virtue comes from their unique ability to transport us instantaneously to places we may never be able to visit in the flesh; they enable us to witness moments in the past that have forged our present and continue to shape our future; they introduce us to unfamiliar people whose stories and experiences give greater meaning to our own. We may not always agree on the ethics or laws pertaining to museums’ time-traveling collections -- as argued in length by James Cuno in his 2008 book, Who Owns Antiquity -- but I am unapologetically thankful that the cultural achievements of civilizations from across the world are just a 45-minute subway ride away.

*As an aside, when I returned home, I jumped online to revisit Neue Gallerie’s website. I can confirm that while it did mention that admission would be free due to closure of the galleries, it did so only in very fine print on a page tucked far away from both the homepage and visitor information page where I’d expect that kind of basic info to be displayed prominently. 

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