V6.P5. Last few days in NY and the way back home...

Let's start with the Metropolitan Museum.
As anything else in NY, it was HUGE. so huge that it diverts the attention from details to the quantity of art pieces you have covered. Hence, despite its well-deserved fame, I found the Met very hard to enjoy as a museum-lover. It was heart breaking no miss so much, but it was also incomprehensively crowded and chaotic.
Some of the paintings I have seen, however, were rather moving. So as to be descriptive of the diversity and overwhelming variety, I will pick and upload those paintings that I really enjoyed seeing and you'll notice how confusing one might get when there is so much dissipation in style as well as period.
(of course you can never blame a museum for being too big or having too large a collection, and I also know that the Met is not the one and only museum that is so huge and overwhelming, but this experience generally made me feel scared of going to Italy, which I will have to do for the first time this month!) Anyway, I ended up blaming myself for just having a day to spend here (it is closed on Mondays) and to compensate I will upload ("applaud" sounds very similar doesn't it, and fits my mood too...) some more of it:





then of course there was the barcelona exhibition that I could not miss: "Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudí to Dalí" presents Barcelona as a booming industrial city with conflicting politics and revolutionary works of art, architecture, and design. To explore the relationships among the visual arts, broader cultural activity, and political events of the era, the exhibition is organized in nine thematic sections, beginning with the origins of the Catalan Renaissance. The remaining sections focus on the major artistic movements that followed: Modernisme, Noucentisme, and other avant-garde idioms such as Surrealism, with a final section on works of art influenced by the Spanish Civil War."
To see so many Spanish artists (including Gaudi, Miro, Dali, Piccasso) and so many pieces of art work from Barcelona was nonetheless brought me into the revelation that I was indeed feeling very strongly about this city (although being them only twice and both for limited periods of time), and cherished the dream of living/being there.

And finally I should also mention the exhibition on Venice and the Islamic World thanks to which I have finally seen the Bellini for all of us who studied primary school in Turkey. :)


such was my Sunday (also including a traffic jam and a dinner at Carmite which seem typical in NYC) and the next few days, I ended up doing less impressive things like sitting around the central park, exploring some of queens, and writing a bit of my legitimacy paper for the Amsterdam Conference. At the end of the day, I had my bag stolen with my laptop (and whatever what not) in it, and hence I will be at a conference that I have not paper for. Sad, I know. "You lose you learn..."