Met

I will admit, I was not sure exactly quite what the genre “abstract expressionism” entailed before coming to the Met. I enjoy art immensely, but I will not claim to be any sort of scholar of art. Several of the artists’ names were familiar to me, others I recognized from similar works I have seen other places, and some were new. The Pollock struck me instantly. Undoubtedly, its placement was designed to do such. It was the first thing to focus on when you walked in the room. I saw a Pollock exhibit when I was younger, ten perhaps. I believe it was at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, but it may have been somewhere else. My mother had refused to go. She hates Jackson Pollock, and explains that his method of painting doesn’t create art, to her, but more of a crazy mess. I was disappointed by this work of his, for a fairly silly reason. As a younger child, I thought that his paintings were amazing because so many of them included junk from his studio layered between paint splatters. Cigarette butts and bits of trash were visible from close up, but got lost in the bigger picture. My brother and I ran from painting to painting trying to find all the hidden treasures.

The exhibition made me start to really consider how to define art. Why is a Pollock or a de Kooning worthy of hanging in a gallery around the corner from a Picasso or a Miró? Why is a Picasso painting widely accepted as art, when a stuffed calendar undoubtedly was laughed at hundreds of times before it graced the walls of the Met? I have no answers to these questions. I can’t help but wonder what artist who is being mocked today will grace the walls of the Met in fifty or one hundred years. I can guarantee though, someone will not consider it art.