The Bigger Picture

An afternoon at the museum

Earlier this week I didn’t have much to do, so in order to stop myself from looking at my phone, I went to a museum.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Miss LACMA if you’re nasty) isn’t far from my house without traffic, but that didn’t stop my brain trying to convince my brain that it was going to be annoying to get there and I should probably just stay home and keep looking at my phone. My brains went back and forth for a bit, but eventually, my brain won out (for the moment!) and I went.   

Fearing the restrictive time limits of nearby street parking, I descended to the museum’s dedicated underground garage, where the very normal cost was 18 American dollars. I panicked and parked, unable to contemplate alternatives lest my one brain catch wind of them and suggest I turn around, go home, and look at my phone.

le entrance

LACMA is free for Los Angeles residents after 3 PM. It was 2:10, so I decided to wait it out and offset the parking ransom. Idling is a terrifying prospect in LA as it’s miles between safe loitering locations—coffee shops, bookstores, Targets. And I was in Mid-Wilshire, a place as purgatorial as it sounds.

Luckily, LACMA is in the center of a museum “complex”: to the east, the LaBrea Tar Pits, to the west the Academy Museum. I could say that it’s wedged between institutions dedicated to life-draining hellholes and you know what? I just did.

I had already been to the Academy Museum (a beautiful tribute to Hollywood giving itself beautiful tributes) so I wandered through the tar pits to read chilling descriptions of what happens if you fall into one. Leave it to LA to have a gorgeous public park filled with active, bubbling tar.

fun sign

After I had inhaled enough, I made my way back to LACMA and did the only thing one can do in these situations: drink a glass of champagne alone and try not to look at my phone for fifteen minutes.

When 3 PM rolled around and I finally entered the museum, I thought, “Huh, this is pretty skimpy.” Then I realized that most of the museum is undergoing a costly, lengthy, and controversial renovation. (That was the hole in the ground I saw earlier!) The contemporary art wing, The Broad, is the only part currently open for business.

The collection was what you’d expect of 20th & 21st Century artists (making sense of a world gone mad, etc.). I was fairly unmoved until I found myself in front of the largest canvas Hockney ever painted: Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio.

via LACMA

I’m reading a book right now called 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman about time and attention in a continued effort to stop looking at my phone. In it, he describes an exercise by a Harvard art professor in which students must sit in front of a work of art for three hours straight and see what happens. There were a bunch of benches in front of the Hockney so I plunked myself down.

I’ve never done mushrooms but I imagine the feeling is similar to engaging that painting with intense focus. The longer I stared, the more colors and shapes revealed themselves. A swimming pool that had first appeared as a solid chunk of blue revealed now unmissable squiggles of white. Trees that seemed plain green transformed into riotous combinations of blues and purples and oranges. Tentacle-like plants creeped out of corners. The painting was alive.

After what felt like an hour I got up and moved to the next gallery, proud my ability to be present for an extended length of time. I checked my phone. I had barely been in front of that painting twenty minutes. A group of young women in sundresses took pictures of an Andy Warhol soup can. One was beyond excited, telling her friend, “This is, like, a really famous painting!”

My final stop was a Barbara Krugman exhibit. It was very on the nose but I think that’s kind of the point. My favorite piece was a surreal video of text and quickly flashing images. The Warhol gals walked in as a picture of Trump flashed across the screen and one of them shouted, “Okay, wow, I was not expecting that.”

On the drive home, I decided to turn on the radio and it told me that a bunch of children and their teachers were massacred in their classroom. I wish I could say I was not expecting that. I wish I could stop looking at my phone. I wish the world wasn’t full of terrible ways to die. I wish I could see what’s hiding in the corners.

(Help Uvalde, help Buffalo, help Laguna Woods, help ourselves.)