It was raining when Tom and I got to New York last month. The heavy rain drove the tourists (like us) inside to the museums. After getting into our apartment, we wandered into the Guggenheim and joined them. The Guggenheim family had made its initial wealth with investments in gold mining in Leadville, the Colorado mining town. They had come to open a mercantile store and invest in the boom of the 1870s and 1990s. They poured their profits into smelting the ore, first in Leadville and then in Pueblo. And money begat money. A few generations later, the investments were in art and in museums that are themselves works of art, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the Guggenheim on 5th Ave. A long way from Leadville.
The museum was jammed, damp with tourists’ wet clothes and umbrellas, but the building, as always, shown for its originality and form. The current exhibit, though, entitled “Haunted” was frankly (sorry Frank) terrible…I am still haunted by how awful it was. Random collections of photos, intellectual pomposity, artistic clap-trap. An elderly couple approached one of the guard-guides who attempt to keep the public from taking photographs (of the photographs) and asked in the most polite and refined manner: “Could you tell us where the art is?”
