No galleries or museums today. A walking tour of Grand Central Terminal and then another of Greenwich Village. Lunch in lovely, leafy Bryant Park, where I found some intriguing arrangements of chairs. Don't they look like awkward, long-legged birds?
Yesterday, at the Museum of Modern Art, I observed a Japanese family: mother, father and daughter of about ten. They would enter a gallery, locate the most iconic painting in the room, and then the mother and child would immediately stand beside the painting and pose, waiting for the father to take their photo. They would then move on directly to the next painting of note.
It has been explained to me that this is a very Oriental approach, using the camera to document the smallest moments of life. Certainly they all spent more time looking into the camera than they did looking at the paintings. It raises the question of how the camera mediates the experience of reality. Does blogging one's experiences also distance one from the moment at hand? When one looks at, say, a seascape rather than the actual crashing surf, how many filters are involved in one's experience of reality?
Perhaps the family's behaviour can be understood as forming a collection. This was simply an acquisition of images considered to be of value. No doubt some art collectors have similar motivations.
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