Beyond the Museum Mile

It goes without saying: When you’re visiting a new place, you’ll have a more intimate experience with your surroundings if you take to the streets like a local rather than a tourist. And there is perhaps no better proof of this fact than in New York City.

In a lot of ways, the bright lights and popular museums of Manhattan seem to have a sort of psychedelic effect on outsiders, sweeping them into a neon, kaleidoscopic vortex.

In 2006, the Metropolitan Museum of Art attracted 4.5 million visitors, about the same number of people who visited Hawaii’s Waikiki Beach that same year. But let’s be honest, doesn’t it kind of take away from the awe-inspiring effect when you pay $20 to view something you’ve already seen in a high school textbook?

On the other hand, just stroll down the street of any of the city’s more eclectic neighborhoods, and you’re sure to see plenty of painters and printmakers displaying their works right on the sidewalk.

There, you can get a glimpse of the art coming from today’s generation rather than from a handful of hyped-up, mostly dead celebrities.

Each time I visit my brother, who lives and teaches in Brooklyn, I have a chance to experience some of the most innovative art you can find in America today. More often than not, I find it located far from the “Museum Mile” of Fifth Avenue.

On my most recent trip, for example, I went to SoHo and
visited Alex Grey’s “Chapel of Sacred Mirrors,” an installation that I could most appropriately describe as mind-blowing.

Grey’s work put to shame any critical claim that art was dead with the advent of postmodernism. He rendered hallucinogenic depictions of various religious figures and sacred images from a number of traditions with such remarkable detail that you could get lost in them for hours. And you’re invited to. The installation provided comfortable chairs and meditation pads in front of most of the works.

When I was there, the place was teeming with visitors, some of them wide-eyed and wearing tie-dyes, while others dressed in the more formal attire of a traditional socialite art snob.

But certainly none of them looked like the tourists you’d find wandering Times Square. No matter their appearance, though, it was evident they were all thoroughly impressed by what they saw.

In attendance that day was Grey himself. I had seen pictures of the painter and was surprised to find him casually talking to one of his admirers when I rounded one of the chapel’s narrow hallways.

I didn’t interrupt the conversation he was having, but I gave him a friendly pat on the back and smiled in approval of his work. He nodded in appreciation.

Now let me ask you this: Do you think it would be possible to meet any of the artists on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, let alone pat them on the back? Not unless you’re willing to handle a corpse, and I guarantee it wouldn’t have much of a response.