METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
With the President-Elect’s administration filling up with Islamophobes and white nationalists, I’m looking for laughs where I can find them these days. And, bless it, the presidential pool report from Berlin, where President Barack Obama just visited with world leaders, got the job done this morning. Its author is New York Times White House correspondent Gardiner Harris. I quote:
Obama sat between Merkel and Renzi at a round table with a white tablecloth that looked like something provided by a cut-rate caterer at an Italian wedding. The room was one of those modernist psychotic spaces decried by Norman Mailer, with a ceiling that undulated downward for no particular reason and a phalanx of western-facing glass that sent the sun’s rays directly into Obama’s and Merkel’s eyes. Surrounding the leaders were modernist paintings that provided splashes of color in an otherwise dreary setting. Think Edward Hopper on the Spree, with a similar sense of desperate loneliness arising from the leaders’ myriad woes.
Someone get this guy on staff as an art critic!
On a tangentially related subject, this just reminded me that we all need to pray that someone gets the Robert Rauschenberg and Alma Thomas paintings off the White House walls before the Trump clan moves in. I imagine the Obama team is on top of this, but if you know anyone with some sway over there, it wouldn’t hurt to nudge them. Not sure if I can handle a photo of President Trump in the same room as those beauties.