This is your brain on drugs

Our trip to the Brooklyn Museum–the second largest art museum in the United States–was wildly successful (see below), but the new facade, designed by the firm of Cresson, Cresson, Cresson & Asshole, still vexes us. We don’t know much about architecture, but we do know that it should make some kind of, uh, sense. The glass addition to the old building, aside from having no apparent function looks like someone stuck high-tech chewing gum to a gorgeous antique bedpost. It also looks like scaffolding, giving us a panic attacks that the painters have not only abandoned the job, but maybe also died.

The museum is better than it was on our first visit in 1980. President Reagan, in his heroic attempt to deny the poor any government money, cut CEDA funds–the program that put poor people to work. So the museum was half shut. It was July, no AC, no fans, and the ancient guard, feeling bad, invited us behind a partition to see one of the shuttered collections and to “have some fun.”

Ewwww.

In spite of that, the museum had cool stuff, including, on the main floor, an funky collection of totem poles. The new improved museum, in its appeal to yuppie scum, has removed about half of them. Since then, they’ve also purchased Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” for the permanent collect, which is like purchasing original dogs-playing-pool painting. The Dinner Party will go on display this year, tragically taking up space that could have otherwise been devoted to coat racks.

Even so, today was special. Because we had tickets, we laughingly waltzed passed the putzes lined up for the Annie Leibowitz exhibit. Heretofore, we didn’t have much use for Leibowitz, whom we pegged as a celebrity photographer. Smugly, perusing the pics of Mick Jagger, Philip Johnson, et. al. we reaffirmed our original assessment…until we came to the one of the oval office–Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Colin Powel, Connie Rice, George Tenet–standing with formal serenity in the vortex power, all giving Liebowitz don’t-fuck-with-me stares. Mesmerizing.

That was nothing compared to the Ron Mueck sculptures. They were not life-life, they were alive, preserved humans–some humongous, some tiny–all freaking alive. Gimmick? Yeah–all super-realism is. But scary too, standing several feet away from the giant naked man and his big mean weenie. And the giantess in bed.