Ode to the Neue

Café Sabarsky, whose marble-topped tables were imported from Vienna, will remain intact.

“What many people do is go see the exhibition and come down to the Cafe Sabarsky to have a delicious coffee,” Lauder said. “As Serge said, ‘If you don’t have good coffee, you don’t have a good museum.’”

 Not sure how this makes me feel.  The Neue Galerie, it's bookstore, and, of course, Cafe Sabarsky is/are one of my favorite treats in NYC.  It enchants me, puts me under some decadent spell.  Sunday brunch in the cafe was always a favorite thing.  I'm like the Rain Man, though, when I go to Manhattan.  I go to the same galleries and museums on the same days.  Sundays would begin at the Neue and end at the Met.  And, as I've confessed a million times, I love to eat in the museums.  The downstairs cafeteria at the old Whitney when it was on 5th--Sarabeths.  The cafeteria at the Met overlooking Central Park through those huge, invisible windows--at the small bar, of course.  And I DO like The Modern at the MoMA.  

The Guggenheim, not so much.  

But I'm feeling punky about it all just now thinking I may never get to NYC again.  One day, I told my mother it would have been better if I had died on the street the day I got run over.  Her take?

"God saved you to take care of me."

Yep.  That's her take on my life.  It is now useless to me.  I am a servant of God.  

I would be remiss if I did not mention that I also like to have a cup of coffee and a pastry or sometimes even a sandwich at the SFMoMA.  It isn't much, and it only looks out over 3rd Street, but I am always enamored of a museum crowd.  

Sadly, I've only ever been to the Institute of Art in Chicago twice--but I never ate there.  I'd love to go back, but again. . . . 

I just love museums, art, food, and drink, all the sensualities and decadence.  Art is decadent.  That is how you can separate it from the crafts.  It is given permission, like a court jester, to express things nobody else can.  It has to be transgressive.  There is no "safe" art.  If it is safe, it is something else altogether.  

It needn't be what you are thinking, though, just because of what I make.  It needn't be sexual, but it is always sensual.  Right?  Those abstract painters of the '40s and 50's and all those working in color fields?  They are sensual.  If I walk into the Whitney and see a string sculpture, it better hit me somewhere in the senses.  I've always thought of the Whitney as the "Fuck You" museum, but I still always go even if the new work usually pisses me off.  It is still, well, usually, transgressive. 

I like to think of Norman Rockwell as a perverted Mr. Rogers.  

O.K.  I gotta go.  Ma needs breakfast.  I'm late and she is busting my ass.  

I just hope the Neue is preserved in mood and tone and texture.  All of it.