New York City: Day 4

I woke up to the most beautiful snowfall I had seen in years. Well, mostly because I live in California and all, but that’s a minor and insignificant detail here. People were building snowmen on our way to the subway station, Joanna was throwing snowballs at me (lol) and it was almost perfect.

We headed straight to the Guggenheim, which was…well, it was what it was. The building itself was beautiful. The Agnes Martin exhibit was a little too abstract for me (and, like, if it’s abstract even for me, that’s saying a lot), but I really enjoyed Sun Yuan & Peng Yu’s Can’t Help Myself and Maurizio Cattelan’s America, aka the well-known 18-karat gold toilet. (Side note: this toilet stood for everything that we learned about in my Icons class. It is a readymade that makes art accessible to the general public by showing them something they are familiar with. It is making a collective experience into art: everyone uses the restroom, the way everyone drinks Coke, which is what Andy Warhol attempted to depict in his Coke bottle painting. You see, not everything you learn is useless.) The best thing about this toilet is that it’s not even in a glass case or anything, and as long as you wait in line, you can go ahead and use it. I’m pretty sure no one did, though, they all just went in, took a picture, and flushed it.  

If all of my dreams turn to shit, at least they should go down an 18-karat gold toilet. (yes, reusing my Instagram caption, but you know what?)

It's a work of art containing works of art. It's artception!!!

After the Guggenheim, we went back to Central Park for a bit (we found a duck!) and then headed straight to Broadway to pick up our tickets to see Chicago. We had lunch at the Starbucks on Times Square (because we just love exploring local food) and then found our way to our seats in the second-f@#%ing-row! It turns out Joanna did a good job with the tickets. Now, I'm not too keen on musicals myself, but Chicago was great. I had seen the movie version before, but I still enjoyed it, except for the part when I fell asleep and woke up to find one of the dancers staring straight at me. Whoops. But it’s all good, as in the end, I was one of the people to catch those roses they throw into the audience, which had always been one of my life goals. Well, not really, but anyway. It was nice.

It's a little ironic that we went to New York to see Chicago.

Once we were done with the play, we headed straight to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, and stayed there all the way until closing. Now, the museum itself is really good, and you can expect to spend quite a bit of time there, but it really emotionally exhausting and definitely not for everyone. 

After the museum, we walked around for a bit, went into the Westfield World Trade Center, which is a mall that looks pretty much like a Venus flytrap, although Joanna couldn’t really see the resemblance. Then we went to Burger King and had chicken fries, because – once again – we just love local food.

See what I mean about it looking like a carnivorous plant??

But I honestly wish we had malls like this in LA.

Following that, I had the sudden urge to go see the iconic Hotel Chelsea, the “informal artists’ colony” of 20^th century New York that was once home to the one and only Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Arthur Miller, Jackson Pollock, and many other people you should really have heard of. So we took the subway all the way to the Chelsea, got lost in the process after turning on the wrong street corner three separate times, and after that entire venture, got to the Chelsea only to find the neon sign completely dark and the hotel cloaked in darkness with scaffolding all around it. I mean, I should have expected that tbh, since the hotel officially closed in 2011, but still. It was truly tragic (well, not really, because a tragedy implies an irreplaceable loss and all that, but you know what I mean). In all my sadness, I snapped a few photos, and returned to the subway station, defeated.

"Dystopias always begin as utopias, and the Chelsea is no different."
(I highly recommend you follow that link)

On the way back, Joanna convinced me that our stuff wouldn’t be there by the time we got home, so that subway ride was somewhat stressful, but it turned out to be a false alarm. And that’s it for our penultimate day in New York.

Click here for day five.