Normally, 'modern art' and I don't go together.
I'm one of those Philistines who is absolutely convinced that I could take some spray paint cans and masking tape and do a Barnett Newman in about twenty minutes.
And I'd only charge the National Gallery ONE million bucks. Cheap at half the price.
But Lady Leadfoot had accompanied me to New York for the Auto Show press days, she loves museums, she hadn't been to the Guggenheim, and - well, Happy Wife, Happy Life.
And who would have guessed: the main exhibition was of the works of Chicago native John Chamberlain who made his sculptures largely out of scrapped automobile parts!
I don't think this exhibition was specifically planned to coincide with the Auto Show. But those clever New Yorkers - you just never know.
There were critics who tried to pin a 'social commentary' thing on to Chamberlain's work, assuming he was making a statement about the violence and social disruption caused by car crashes, and by extension, about the upheaval of the civil rights movement (Chamberlain started all this in the late-1950s; he passed away late last year).
But just as in the Doonesbury comic strip some years ago, where Bob Dylan responded to a comment from the US President that Dylan was a 'Poet of the People' by simply saying, "Man, I was just trying to make it rhyme!", Chamberlain said car parts were raw material, nothing more.
"What the hell," he said to an interviewer who brought this issue up. "Do you talk to a painter about what kind of paint he's using? It's boring!"
The Guggenheim people get very cranky if you take photographs inside the museum itself. The piece shown to the right, made apparently of old bumpers, is positioned outside the museum.
I'm not saying this exhibition is going to make me a modern art fan.
But for a car guy, it could have been a lot worse.
It also didn't occur to me while I was rolling my MINI JCW into a tight little ball at Targa Newfoundland back in 2008, I might have been on my way to becoming an artiste...
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