During my visit to the Met this past Friday, many different pieces of art spoke to me. The first one to showcase is the Chess and Goose Board, a piece I had never seen or even heard of before this visit, made in Gujarat, India, in the late 16th century out of ebonized wood, historic ivory, horn, and gold wire. I’m a person who believes in function over form, but when the function has the form, it gives it extra sauce. This piece breaks the mold of my preexisting ideas about art, in the sense that during our seminar, we discussed that all art is inherently useless, this piece is not only striking in its form, but also functions as a goose game board on one side and a chess board on the other. Overall, my beliefs were challenged by how ornate the goose board is. Every time I look at the photo, I find a new detail that I had not noticed previously. The chessboard specifically reminds me of the many concrete chessboards that are found all throughout NYC parks. Come to think about are those pieces of art that will be housed in museums 1000 years from now?
Another piece that caught my attention was William Orpen’s Self-Portrait (Leading the Life in the West), a piece I was seeing for the first time, painted around 1910 in oil on canvas. This piece confirms my preexisting concept of art, as it is a traditional framed painting. It is also inherently useless in the fact that it serves no other function other than to be observed and thought about. The painting’s first public showing was right here in New York, at a gallery on Fifth Avenue in 1914, the same year the Met brought it into the collection, and it’s been resurfacing in New York exhibitions on and off ever since. Taking out the context or the original intention of the artist, I feel like I see a lot of New York in this piece. This feels like a native New Yorker, through and through, a person on the move, getting ready to rejoin the hustle and bustle of the city. Doing a last phone, keys, wallet check. His walking stick could also be observed as a leash, perhaps his dog is just out of the frame within the frame. Some might say that he is too overdressed for such occasion, but here in the city, people tend to slightly overdress for every occasion when compared to more suburban environments.
