May 9, 2019--Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala

Rubbing elbows with Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Picasso were Demi Moore, Chris Rock, and Miley Cyrus. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute gala organized and hosted by Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour.

Lady Gaga and Titian, Katy Perry and Manet? Together at the Temple of Dendur, munching finger food and getting sloshed with champaign? 

If Titian and his artist friends had stayed home (which they should have) it would have been like an evening at the GRAMMYs or the Golden Globes (thus the champaign reference).

How much money could the Met have netted from the affair that would have (perhaps) justified selling themselves out to the highest bidder? I could even have gotten excited if Met benefactors Charles and David Koch (the rightwing Koch Brothers) had written a check to cover the yield.

Take a look at Lady Gaga sprawled on the steps of the Met who shed three layers of clothes before she got to her costume--bra, panties, panty hose, and six-inch heels.

And then check out Katy Perry who came as a big cheeseburger.

It's good to be in Maine and away from all this ridiculousness. 

June 11, 2014--Fracking the Frick

I prefer my Vermeers in intimate settings. Hushed rooms with velvet wall coverings such as those at the Frick Collection in New York City.

At the other end of the New York scale, I like my cheesecake unadorned in its pristine basicness at Junior's restaurant in downtown Brooklyn.

But this is, alas, all about to change.

Just the other day, Rona and I drove into Brooklyn to get a slice. We hadn't been there in years. Halfway across the Manhattan Bridge an array of glittering skyscrapers appeared, all surrounding what had until recently been a downtown overlooked in the city's real estate surge.

But no more.

During the past decade 33 new residential towers were built with a total of 5,300 apartments. There are another 11 under construction, and 16, as they say in the real estate business, are "in development." These in total will add another 12,500 housing units.

Brooklyn really is the new Manhattan. And this means that Junior's has got to go.

It sits on a clearly valuable site on Flatbush Avenue Extension right down the street from my old high school (Brooklyn Tech) and about four blocks north of the new Barclay Center where the Brooklyn Nets play and Jay-Z packs the house.

So Junior's has to be torn down and a 1,000 foot residential tower needs to take its place. No more cheesecake. No more place in the city where African-Americans and white folks can gather over great hamburgers, onion rings, buckets of pickles, and of course the cheesecake voted number one year-after-year by New York Magazine.

And there will no more Frick as we know it if museum officials can get the city's permission to add a six-storey wing to its current jewel-box galleries.

The claim is that they need the new space to better accommodate blockbuster shows like the recent one that featured a host of Vermeers, including the iconic Girl With Pearl Earring on loan from the Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague. People lined up around the corner hours in advance of opening hours and the Frick could barely squeeze through the exhibit the tens of thousands who showed up.

They also need the new space, the New York Times reports, so they can have a rooftop garden and, I assume, cafe. These days without coffee no one will show up. Even for a Vermeer.

May 9, 2014--Schmattas at the Met

Half my family was in the schmatta business. The rag business. Ladies clothes.

Cousin Moritz sold cloth and fur coats from a shabby loft on 36th Street. They were not the best quality, my father took endless pleasure pointing out, but if you knew Moritz, better, if you were related, he sold to you wholesale.

So the buttons fell off after brief usage and they never quite fit right, but there was family pressure to give him the business. (I always suspected that the idiom--give someone the business--was derived from the way he and his bitter rival Uncle Max, his brother-in-law, operated.)

Max made and sold fancy, special-occasion dresses and his female relatives, my mother, her four sisters, and a dozen nieces and cousins, were expected to shop at his broken-down warehouse of a showroom even though the seams on the sleeves tended to unravel even before the bar mitzvah boy could finish half his Haftorah.

It was a shonda, a terrible shame but that's the way things worked in those days.

These days, things work differently. At least some things do when it comes to women's designer clothes.

Now even the Metropolitan Museum of Art is in the schmatta business.

Through its Costume Institute, sorry, I mean its newly-named and endowed Anna (Vogue magazine) Wintour Costume Center contemporary fashion, celebrity, and commerce are pushing aside Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Matisse.

At last week's annual gala (Anna's A-list party) alongside Vermeer's Woman with a Lute we now have schmattas by Oscar de la Renta worn by Sarah Jessica Parker and Rianna in Stella McCartney. Next to Bruegel's Harvesters one finds Nicole Richie decked out in Donna Karan. Beside Rembrandt's Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, posing is Lena Dunham in a gown by Giambattista Valli. And preening in front of Henri Matisse's Reclining Odalisque, David Beckham sports the Bronx's Ralph Lauren.

Puzzled by the Met's interest in fancy schmattas, their relationship to the museum's high-culture collection, there were some answers in a New York Times article that cites the thoughts of one of the designers-of-the-moment--Charles James.

He thinks about clothing as sculpture. As "a prop for the performance of living." But it's not the body that's sculpted or even the fabric, but rather, "It's the air that's sculpted, not the silk."

Got it.

And the connection between fancy outfits and the Met is now clear:

Dresses=sculpture; sculpture=art; art=Metropolitan Museum of Art.