On the weekend, we visited the Albright-Knox gallery in Amherst, a suburb of Buffalo. It’s reputed to have one of the finest collections of Modern Art in the world, and I was pretty keen on seeing it. You see, I’d taken a course on Modern Art back in university, and having attended nearly 15% of the lectures, considered myself to be something of an expert. I mean, I still have the textbook.
As we passed through Upstate New York, driving past Larry’s Liquor, Cheryl’s Business School, a variety of tire graveyards and a dozen billboards for avenging lawyers, I blathered on about getting a chance to see one of my favourite paintings—Elegy to the Spanish Republic, by Robert Motherwell.
The gallery itself was a squat and formidable structure, resembling a bank, which it kind of is. It’s a small place, and it took no more than an hour to go though it, and while doing so I found myself moving quickly, as if I was in some sort of race. For whatever reason, nothing was really grabbing hold of me. Standing in one of the main rooms, my friend Chris pointed out the Motherwell painting that I had been talking about in the car. I hadn’t even noticed it, and wouldn’t have, if he hadn’t mentioned it to me. I hustled over and gave it a good look. It was smaller than I had thought, and less vivid, somehow. It just didn’t feel like the startling and iconic work I had imagined it would be. I looked at it for maybe 20 seconds, and then moved along
The ugly truth was that I was kind of bored by the gallery, and what I was most looking forward to was visiting the gift shop at the end. I bought a coffee mug and a bunch of postcards, thinking of them as a concrete testimony of my cultural virtue. The shameful reality was that I was more interested in the commercial representations of the art, and what they symbolically said about me, than I was about the experience of the art itself. We then spent the next six hours trolling through factory outlets, crossing back into Canada at midnight, with hundreds of other people, each one returning with little pieces of America.