Moma in our plague year

 I went to the Moma yesterday for the first time in over a year. It was also over a year that I was in midtown and anyone who thinks we are on the road to normal should take a subway ride up there. The streets that were once crowded and bustling with people were now mainly deserted. Empty and dismal. I thought I would cry. The cold and grey weather didn’t help matters, everything looked dull and sharp at the same time. I actually stood in the center of 6^th ave with no traffic coming at me. The long and dull subway ride from Brooklyn was also pretty much devoid of people, but clean. We look like aliens from somewhere strange in our masks starring into space. The Moma itself was also empty which I guess was a blessing in a way since I had most of the galleries to myself at times. It was also quiet, the din of the crowds gone, but now replaced with talkative loud guards who acted like they were in their living rooms and some who played with their phones. The emptiness also made me more aware of just how ugly this place really is with badly designed spaces that are unwelcoming huge and dismal. I saw the small Calder show, and a pleasant but unsurprising show of drawings from their collection with the usual suspects but an unknown artist hanging here and there. The big show is the early 20^th century exhibition of Russian and European graphic design including great posters, flyers, propaganda, books, advertising and some paintings by many of my favorite artists of that period. The title like much of the Moma is longwinded and pompous “Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented. I failed to take in their permanent collections because I was getting tired and had a long boring subway ride back home.