First Friday at the Guggenheim: The Partying Arts
THE EVENT
For my second cultural experience, I wanted to go with something slightly more traditional, like a museum, but my night at the museum turned out to be anything but traditional. While I was checking out possible exhibits and hours online, hoping to maybe even find one with some kind of break on pricing, I stumbled upon something unexpected: a party. As it turns out, the Guggenheim hosts a major party on the First Friday of every month that features an abundance of music and booze to go along with their fine collections of art.
Don’t get too excited though, there is a catch. Rather than paying the regular $18 admission fee, they hit you up for $25 at the door, plus the cost of “drink tickets.” Three bucks gets you a ticket, two tickets will get you a plastic cup full of beer or wine. All in all, this got pretty expensive over the course of the evening.
In addition to the steep pricing, the space got crowded quickly, and there was a long line to get in. Despite arriving twenty minutes early, it took me about an hour to get in the door, check my coat and buy my first drink.
THE SCENE
Inside, the scene was a lot like a very well lit dance club, minus the dancing. Since no one was allowed up to the exhibits with drinks in hand, most people simply stayed downstairs on the entry level, which consequently became uncomfortably crowded. Music was provided by two supposedly big name DJ’s, but no one was really paying attention, and it didn’t seem to add much to the experience. Honestly, I can’t say much to recommend this party over any other bar or club that you could get into cheaper and with less hassle, so if it’s the party scene you’re interested in, you might as well skip First Friday and go elsewhere.
If, on the other hand, you’re interested in getting a little exposure to the arts with your revelry, you can simply slug back your drink and head upstairs to the galleries. Once you get up the ramp and onto the spiraling landing where the exhibits are on display, the crowd thins out considerably, and you can take your time viewing the various pieces at leisure.
THE ART
The exhibitions currently being shown contain a variety of paintings by Spanish artists from “El Greco to Picasso,” as the gallery proudly proclaims on its walls. These pieces were separated out not by artist but by their subject matter, including still life, portraits, landscapes, and many others. In this way, I was able to see highly accurate representations of, say, a person sitting at a table, side by side with the jumbled images of a Picasso piece on the same subject. My personal favorite among these was “Peasants at a Table” by Velazquez, which I starred at for quite a while, spinning up stories in my head about the people in the painting. Dali’s “Madonna of Port Lligat,” along with much of his other work were also favorites of mine.
Religion, nobility, and death were all fairly prominent themes from these Spanish artists, whose pieces were displayed in the spiraling main gallery, but branching out to the side I found another smaller space with an exhibit called “Family Pictures.” These were picture and portraits, mostly of children, showing families or family members. Many of them were rife with implied violence and gender distortion, however, giving the entire experience an unsettling feel. One piece in this gallery wasn’t a picture at all, but a series of video clips depicting what I can only describe as some kind of overly exaggerated caricature of kissing. While strange and perhaps even a little disturbing, this bizarre gallery held my attention for quite a while before I decided to wrap up my visit and head home.
FINAL THOUGHTS
While I had originally set out to find a deal on museum admissions, I ended up dropping quite a bit of cash instead. The art was enjoyable, and the experience may have even been slightly enhanced by the few drinks I’d had before heading up, but on the whole, the party wasn’t that great. If I had to do it again, I would probably skip the party altogether and go during regular viewing hours. Wandering through the entire museum (or at least everything that was accessible at the time) took me a little under two hours, but that would have certainly been elongated had I been able to take advantage of the complimentary audio tours which they have during the day. All told, it was a fairly full, if somewhat pricey evening, but the scene was simply not what I was hoping for.