Looking at People Looking at Art

Kate and I went to New York this weekend to visit some friends/family and to look at some art. I wanted to see the new Brücke exhibit at the Neue Galerie - I love me some Expressionists, and I'd never been to that museum - and we both wanted to see the new Walker Evans postcard exhibit at the Met (a museum I'd also never visited).

(I've been to New York like a thousand times but somehow I never make it to anything cultural or touristy, always finding myself face-down in some dive instead, or recovering from having spent the previous evening face-down in some dive. Last December was the first time I made it to an actual NYC museum, the Guggenheim, and then largely because I was with my mother and grandmother, whose interest in putting their faces down in some dive is rather less than mine.)

Anyway, I'll not describe these exhibits - or the ancillary activities we engaged in, such as searching for whoopie pies in the Village, buying books we didn't need at the Strand, filling our luggage with remarkably stinky bagels in Brooklyn, chatting with cousins, dining with an old friend on the Upper East Side - except to note that they're well worth your time and money, if time and money you have, and especially if you have a thing for paintings with great big vibrant planes of color and/or hand-colored old postcards and vernacular photography.

What I'd like to share with you, instead, are some of my own photos from the Met. I love art and I love looking at art, but I also love looking at people looking at art. So, too, do I love taking photos of perfect strangers looking at art. I didn't quite realize I was developing this theme until I got home and was going through my photos this afternoon, but the results are fairly amusing, and I hope you like them.

(Note 1: One of these people is not, in fact, a perfect stranger - see if you can determine which one.)

(Note 2: Another one of these people bears a striking resemblance to Tony Roberts, Woody Allen's friend ("Max") in Annie Hall - hint: this person may be made of marble.)

(Note 3: In one of these photos the looking-at-art is implied, rather than visually demonstrated - it's something that's already happened, and we're just witnessing the aftermath.)