Pictures of Pictures

One of the oddest things about going to the MoMA the other day was visiting the permanent collection and people-watching. I had heard so much about the building and the re-installation of the collection, but hadn't had a chance to visit. Clearly, the forces of reification had been successfully brought to bear on the works, as evinced by the number of people who whipped out their cellphones and started shooting pictures of their favorite works. (What, the bookstore stopped selling postcards?) I thought I would share these photos, taken with my phone.

I guess I can imagine sending photos to people live ("Look, honey! I'm in New York CIty and they've got a big Picasso!") but I can't quite see what one hopes to capture when one shoots a picture of a painting with the modern equivalent of a pinhole camera.

There were so many people milling around the galleries, and taking pictures - the cell phone came out in the galleries in which Picassos hung, and stayed out through the Impressionist and Post-Impressionists. Before that, one would see people posing next to large works while other took pictures of them. I wished I'd taken a picture of a teenager standing next to a large Warhol making the kind of gesture one sees at a heavy metal concert as her friends took her picture.

Perhaps I sound cynical, but I'm not. I really enjoyed watching all these people interacting with the art they were looking at, and the frantic duplication of the museum into pixels was ultimately moving. After all, before it says anything, photography says I was there, and if the museum is an important enough site to click, preserve, and share - as important as the smiles of people out for drinks or whatever we use cell phone cameras for - then something must be right with the world...