This past week, my family and I headed to New York City to tour two colleges: Columbia and NYU.
Our son wants to be a writer and both offer stellar programs.
We arrived on Sunday afternoon and our first stop was a visit to the Guggenheim museum. Or, as my husband refers to it: ” A Monument To Self Indulgence.” 🙂
Photos were only allowed on the ground floor…which is why I do not have a photo of one of the exhibits…the absurdly titled “The Bisexual Flower.” It is “a motorized plexiglass flower-shaped fountain bubbling with glowing bath salt nectar. The work…is not just loud but dangerous: as it screeches it glows and protective glasses are provided to shelter your eyes from the UV light.” (source: gallersityny.com). To protect people from those UV rays, the entire display was shielded by what resembled a giant igloo bubble.
I respect people’s right to create art. However, this just seemed so absurd that our entire family burst out laughing as we observed this spectacle. This definitely garnered us some disdainful looks from the obviously more sophisticated art lovers among us, but so be it.
Give me a lovely Monet to get lost in any day.
Each display seemed more ridiculous than the next, so our time at the Guggenheim was quite short. It was unfortunate that the day we visited, a modern art exhibit was being featured but it provided us with enough laughs for months to come.
The next two days were a whirlwind of college tours, restaurants, heart-pounding taxi rides, and fascinating people-watching.
Those two days in the city seemed to fly by.
As our cab hurtled toward Grand Central Station, I quietly snapped this photo of Josh…
He was quiet as he watched the Manhattan skyline rush by, seemingly lost in his thoughts and dreams.
There truly is no place like New York City.
“New York remains what it always has been: a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shift in population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring—it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.”—Paul Goldberger
Power Of A Moment 