Musings from the God of Cities

this past weekend i went to the opening of the rubin museum of himalayan art. it wasn't the gala affair that one thinks of when one thinks of when one hears about a museum opening, but i'm hardly the kind of guy who would go to a gala affair anyways, so it's all good.

the opening was celebrated by a tiny little street fair where they had:


folks playing some kind of tibetan dice game,


artists artisting it up,


storytelling for children,


folks in ethnic costumage,




attractive lads (though i think their presence was largely coincidental)


and a parade of tibetan dogs, which included:


democratic dogs (hey, this is new york, after all.)


as well as some thoroughly gay dogs (again, this is new york).

the museum itself was quite lovely. one of the docents informed us that the floors themselves had been designed to be like mandalas as you can sort of see here:





there was a ton of awesome art:













so much art, in fact, that after a while my companion, the lovely and talented mizz p-hol, and i left after only really having seen about two-thirds of the exhibits. one can only look at so much himalayan art before one wants to emulate the figure below, and drive arrows through one's eyes.



all told, i'm completely new to, and largely ignorant of art in general, and himalayan art, specifically. because of this, i read most of the captions by each individual piece of art, which grew tiring after a while. also, not having any base knowledge of what i was looking at, everything looked very similar. even though the art was really amazing in terms of details, quality, etc. it got kind of tiring after a while. ah well, next time i'll just take the audio tour...