Bringing Art to the Masses

On Tuesday, June 3, New York City held its 30th annual Museum Mile Festival, an event where all museums along the mile provide free access to the public for one evening. Between 6 and 9pm, 23 blocks on 5th Avenue between 82nd and 105th street were car-free and replaced with live bands, entertainment (e.g. balloon artists), and tons of chalk for sidewalk art. In theory, the event is a huge success for bringing many forms of art to public eyes, many of which have not had the opportunity to ever step into these museums on the Upper East Side.

The first festival, held in June 1978, was an “instant success” for exposing New Yorkers and visitors to the arts and forming new museum audiences. Total attendance records over the years have surpassed one million visitors, and the influx of people was no exception this year. Nine museums participated in the festival, but I only had the opportunity to visit two in the allotted time and before I was completely exhausted and sick of the crowds.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibit Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy explores the symbolic and metaphorical associations that inspire superhero creators and fashion designers to introduce similar types of “bodies” through their work. These include the graphic body (Superman, Spiderman), the patriotic body (Captain America, Wonder Woman), the virile body (the Hulk), the paradoxical body (Catwoman), the armored body (Batman, Iron Man), the aerodynamic body (The Flash), the mutant body (X-Men), and the postmodern body (Ghost Rider, the Punisher). I thought that the design of the exhibit was spectacular; the categorization of the work had a nice flow and I especially loved the iconic superhero typography on the white glossed walls. My biggest issue was how the Metropolitan Museum of Art handled its crowd; it was really like a herd of cattle moving from caption to caption accompanied by the frequent proclamation: “No photographs!”

The Cooper-Hewitt decided to handle its crowd by designating a specific flow of traffic through the museum. While I understood their intention to keep everyone moving in the same direction so that the most number of people could be let into the museum to see the work, I felt hustled to the point where I decided to just breeze through the exhibit and watch the glassblowing in the museum’s courtyard instead. GlassLab is “an innovative program of The Corning Museum of Glass that pairs its master glassmakers with some of the most creative minds working in design today.” Here are some pictures I took while one of the designs came to life:

Overall, the weather was beautiful and it was great be accompanied by so many different faces to enjoy art in the city, but I couldn’t help but feel like the success of the event was hindered by its time limit. Why not make a whole afternoon out of it instead of just three hours? Why just once a year? If the city can coordinate these types of events more frequently, perhaps the museum traffic would be more manageable. Unlike the 1970s when the festival began, we live in a technological age. We can bring masterpieces into our classrooms and living rooms by jumping on the internet. We should be raising the bar of the festival’s purpose from mere exposure to the arts to teaching the masses how to appreciate and understand the arts—something that surely cannot be done in just one evening.

Museum Mile Festival: http://www.museummilefestival.org/
Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy: http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={5B98D8A0-AB67-4137-8F5E-873FDB82EE73}&HomePageLink=special_c3a
NYT Article about Glass Lab: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/arts/design/28glas.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Slideshow from GlassLab: http://blog.cooperhewitt.org/2008/05/28/slideshow-glasslab