I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art tonight, for the first time ever. I’ve been to The Frick Museum several times and I love the collection there, but I’d never been to the mother of all museums before. And I’ve lived in New York for 4 years. The thing is, now I wish I’d never gone. The museum is so enormous and amazing and now that I know that (I mean I always ‘knew’ that but now I’ve actually seen how expansive it is)I can’t stop myself from dying to go back. I have to see all of it. Awful.
I went to the museum with my class and we looked at several pieces. We surrounded a painting and played a game called the Delayed Judgement Activity. In this activity, you reserve all of your judgement and make objective statements about the piece. For example, “This woman looks happy” is subjective while “This painting has four women and a man” is objective. So we went around three times and tried making our statements as objective as possible. The neat thing about the activity is that it’s a group-activity. One person makes a statement and we all ponder whether that’s really objective or not. This process causes each observer to notice things that she or he hadn’t paid attention to before the exercise. The painting, therefore, completely transforms right before your eyes. It’s really magical.
By the way, the practice of separating objective from subjective is really difficult and requires a personal effort, especially when talking about an artistic object.
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