Hi, I'm Jen Graves

And I'm Not Going to Miami.

While the rest of the art stream went east this weekend, I flew back home to Seattle after spending a week in New York. This week, while also a personal vacation, was supposed to provide a "substantial" art experience as opposed to the craven follies of ABMB. That's the word a curator used to encourage me when I told him I was anxious about not going to Miami. I'd had to decide between a vacation and Miami, and my editor at The Stranger was disinterested in reading about Miami for a third year in a row.

In a fit of overcompensation for my near-future of cluelessness, I went to the Brooklyn Museum, where I finally attended Judy Chicago's Dinner Party and caught a redux of Global Feminisms; at the Guggenheim, I came to understand better why I dislike Richard Prince; at MoMA, I stared deep into the half-closed eyes of the lonely shark and found myself surprisingly underwhelmed at the forest of Puryears. At the Met, I revisited a Goya favorite (while finishing Robert Hughes's ultimately disappointing biography) and looked longingly at the Age of Rembrandt. At the Whitney, I silently applauded Kara Walker's withering drawn responses to her critics, and I delicately sidestepped Lawrence Weiner's two minutes of spraypaint on the floor. I zigzagged Chelsea (Charles Ray, Carl Andre, Thomas Demand, Ross Bleckner, Edward Burtynsky, Wolfgang Tillmans, Liz Craft).

By then it was Thursday, and time for the substance of the substance: the press opening of the New Museum, that legendary place said to outpace everything.

What I found instead was a fashionable show of familiar artists based on a stale concept under hideous lighting in hesitant architecture.

Maybe I should have chosen Miami. More tomorrow.

--Jen Graves
jgraves@thestranger.com

CORRECTION: The shark hasn't moved. It's at the Met, still set marvelously perversely astride a window overlooking Central Park (which is the best thing about the display, not the other shark paintings on view), not at MoMA. What a dumb slip. My sincere apologies.