October 10, 2005

[cultured] ^{9:43 PM}

Yes, I had been a bad artboy.

For months the Museum of Contemporary Art has had a Basquiat exhibit, and on sunday the banners littering the streets finally did their job and had me looking into visiting. Good thing I did, the exhibit closes today.

So I made my way to the Hollywood & Highland metro stop for my first trip on the LA subway system.

The LA subway system is ... interesting. The stations are all un-manned (meaning there was no one I could ask, "What stop do I need to get off at for MOCA?"), there are no turnstiles (meaning that buying a ticket is more a civil duty rather than a requirement), and there are cloth seats (meaning what becomes sticky, will likely stay sticky. Forever).

Apparently I wasn't the only one who went "Oh, hey, today's the last day for Basquiat." For the first time in my memory (field trips excluded) there was a cluster, nay, a line, of people waiting to get into the exhibit, which pretty much consumed the entire museum (much like the MOCA banners have consumed every streetlamp in town for months).

While MOCA didn't have the bredth or selection that I'd become to used to thanks to the Smithsonians and National Galleries, it did have over 100 pieces of JMB's work, which as always treaded the line between brilliant and trite.

Among the cluster of people were also many celebrities getting their "culture" on. For a while things felt normal, until a midwestern family of five on vacation began being a Midwestern Family of Five on Vacation with a former doctor from Chicago Hope (who, by the way, was retardedly wearing sunglasses in an art musuem).

My online research had also lead me to notice that the Geffen Contemporary (an "adjacent" MOCA facility) had re-opened today with an exhibit called Ecstacy. I say "adjacent" because it was over 10 blocks away in Little Tokyo. And you should infer that "Ecstacy" means "Take the pill before walking in."

The Geffen wasn't even a mixed bag. It was 3 interesting spaces followed by dozens of other "modern art piecies" that make Contemporary Art Museums places you can't drag a friend to because they give you dirty looks while they stand in a room with a single blinking light and a pile of Skittles on the floor.

The main highlights were some surreal oil on panel pieces, and a giant golden sphere, that was a giant sound-proof inverted mirrorball that played the audio from 50's noir films. I can only concluded that my 30 second experience inside was as close as I'll ever get to being a coked-out Diana Ross at Studio 54.