My son and I went to MOMA yesterday to take in Monet’s Water Lilies, or dive in I should say. The 40-foot wide triptych (which I vividly recalled from the last time they did this show) is the kind of canvas you can disappear into and many of the museum’s members seated before it appeared to be quite lost. 

We then took a stroll though some of MOMA’s permanent collection, and hence a history of modern art (Pollock, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Warhol) — sort of a downward arc for me. By the time we got to the seventies I found myself thinking of food, and I’m happy to report that the cafe on the second floor (thanks to Danny Meyer) has the best grub of any museum I’ve ever visited. The absence of surly servers was disorienting, though. 

Even more discombobulating was the way a number of visitors now experience museums: through their iPhones. My son was taking pictures of different paintings that struck his fancy (one of Jasper John’s flags, Picasso’s Charnel House) but soon I realized half the people there were doing the same thing — and quickly. Stop, point, click, move on. And a number of them took pictures of the wall text too, the better to later read up on what they couldn’t stop to savor.

Huh? To me the great joy of going to look at paintings lies in just that. It’s one thing to read about Pollock, or see a movie about him, and something else altogether to stand before one of those massive drip paintings and get some sense of the action and emotion that went into making them. if you want little images of art you can find them online, better than anything you can capture with your phone. For a lot of people it seems to be a way of charting their existence, a sort of Kilroy-was-here approach to art and life. Maybe they’re making some sort of statement, like Banksy — some sort of massive prank, a work of art in itself. The upside is that it leaves me more time to linger.