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Child as Taste Receptacle
I had a chance to sneak up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and see an absolutely amazing show of Van Gogh's drawings. Everything about them is remarkable. If you're hitting these shores, it's around until the end of December. Don't miss it.
Having said that, the crowds are savage, which is the case with all "once in a lifetime" art shows- they bring out the worst in everyone. Back, back, way back in the halcyon 1990s I went to the "once in a lifetime" Vermeer show at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and I am hard pressed to picture a surlier crowd. A woman I know who was working at the museum at the time said she frequently wondered at the propensity of Vermeer's exquisite tranquil examinations of interior light and domestic scenes to inspire fistfights.
No one came to blows at Van Gogh, but this trip really reminded me of the visits I used to make to museums with my family. Maybe this was because the drawings seem to have a narrative element. (Often it feels as if one is looking at a beautiful scene from a story. There is a moment where this feeling comes to life in the show where the exhibit presents a letter Van Gogh wrote to a friend in which he just casually drops in a sketch of a man walking with the sun behind him. How amazing to be able to draw and write with such amazing verbal/visual ambidexterity.) We used to go quite a lot and my parents were always good about making art accessible to their children. Of course, the Metropolitan Museum is in many ways made for kids, and I'm not the first person to think that. Arms and Armor, the Egyptian rooms, mythology paintings- so much of the place is perfect for kids, though I suspect the museum trips have to start quite early so that a sense of pleasure can invent itself before the "museums are boring" ethos sets in.
As I looked at the Van Gogh drawings, I kept catching myself thinking with great eagerness about how, when he is older, I want to take Felix to museums and show him the stories in drawings and paintings; how, when he's older, I have so many movies to show him. I've started keeping a list. That delicious Technicolor Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn is at the top right now. And of course I have so many books that I want to give him. Surely all parents get taken up with this urge to pour everything they love into their children. A friend of mine who is amicably divorced says that one of her big tugs-of-war with her ex was over how to divide which books and movies each of them would get to read to or watch with their kid.
Maybe this excitement is brought on by the holidays and the feeling that with Felix, everything is new and today I have traditions and surprises and pleasures that the season hasn't held for me for quite some time. But even more than the holidays I'm looking forward to these other things- films and books, excursions to museums. I only hope my excitement doesn't backfire and I wind up with a kid who would rather pull my hair out than watch a Michael Curtiz swashbuckler.
Pity me, if I am. At least the dog will watch with me, provided I share the popcorn.
posted by Elise at 10:28 AM
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