Lessons From the Guggenheim

Good morning, Effers! Just back from a long, cold day in NYC, walking and museuming. I went to the Guggenheim for the very first time and just loved it. I’ve been to the Met many times and the Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side, but the Guggenheim – what an experience! There was some performance art going on, of a couple making out on the floor in very, very slow motion which was frankly kind of embarrassing. But a totally different perspective brought something new to the sight – seen from above, it was an artful ballet. Seen from the bottom level it was as if two people were trapped in sap and unable to stop groping one another embarrassingly. Depends on how you look at it.

There was another installation in which a small child takes you aside and asks you to define progress and then you get passed off to several different participants who walk at your side up the rotunda and argue with you about consumerism and (in my case) Hollywood and whether humans have actually progressed. This experience is actually an exhibit by Tino Sehgal and it was one of the most wonderful, alive, spontaneous art exhibits I have ever been a part of.

As I walked up the rotunda and took in all the sights, I came across a mobile by Alexander Calder. What a thing of absolute balance and beauty a Calder mobile is. It seems lately that everywhere I look I see metaphors for and about screenwriters. Of course the mobile reminded me of how very important balance is in our lives.

In the same way, looking at the Cézanne and Miró and Manet made my eyes go wide with wonder: How gorgeous pure, abstract expression on canvas is! And yet – I’m sure Renoir and Monet and Picasso also knew the fundamentals before they were able to really express themselves in a more raw manner. Of course I thought of screenwriters and how badly we want to just wear our black turtlenecks and go all Jackson Pollock but how we need to at first put our smocks on, sharpen our pencils and learn how to draw an apple before we can go wild and do it well. That’s the thing, isn’t it? For those of you down with your art history, you know Picasso painted very normal (but still beautiful) art well before the modern art he is famed for. You know, faces with three noses, things like that. Don’t think for one minute that Picasso couldn’t draw or paint a perfectly respectable park with flowers in it before he moved on to his experimental period much later in his life.

Perspective is everything, being spontaneous and allowing exploration in creativity is delightful, maintaining balance and learning that discipline necessarily precedes the avant-garde – these were all lessons delivered by the universe to me this afternoon at the Guggenheim. That’s what I call a red letter day.

Leave tomorrow morning early for London and am SO excited to meet so many of those UK writers who have emailed and been blog readers over time. I’ll be getting together with Sam, Danny, Henri, our very own Kodjo (!!) and many others. I’ll be lecturing four times – in London for two days, at Oxford University for 90 minutes, at the University in Bristol for 90 minutes and again in Oxford for two days. I’m gonna sound like Brenda Vaccaro when all is said and done! For those of you under 40, she is a prolific and a VERY husky-voiced actress.

That is all. Now get back to work.