Art?

Sarah and I were in New York City in June for our First Anniversary trip. (I'm calling it our "First Anniversary trip" because we hope to take a trip every anniversary! I tried to tie it to the accepted anniversary year gift, with first being paper and us taking a trip to a local paper mill, but that received a less-than-enthusiastic response from the trip committee...)

Anyway, it was like a million degrees outside that weekend, so we decided to seek out some air conditioning. We headed to The Met so that we could check out the new exhibit on superheroes, but then also took a lap around the rest of the joint. (Oh, and by "lap," I really mean that we trudged around in confusing circles, map in hand, with absolutely no idea of how the sucky map correlated to the actual building in which we were walking. If we would have been told afterward that the map we were given was actually a map for the corn maze at Half Moon Bay, I would have believed it!)

While in one of many confusing corridors, we stumbled upon one of the best examples of post-modern art that we've seen in quite a while. Or, post-modern lunch, I should say. This guy, Jasper Johns, obviously had nothing better to do in the year of my birth than create a realistic rendering of a slice of white bread from sheet-lead relief and embossed rag paper (whatever that is). Now, I'm sure that this piece voices some commentary on the artist's upbringing during the depression, when food was scarce, juxtaposed against the late-sixties modernization of the nuclear family's standardized diet, mixed in with a statement on the homogenization of American culture and the blandness of simple white bread.

But I digress. What I see is a perfectly rendered slice of white bread. If only the exhibit next to it was focused on peanut butter and jelly... Now there's art!

Oh, and just as a disclaimer, I "purchased" these photos from the gift shop. I did not ignore the constant "no pictures please" chants from the security guards and sneak this photo on my phone while pretending to be making a call. No I did not.