New York – It’s a hip place on Friday nights: great art, terrific restaurants. And the price is right.
People are clamoring to get into the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art when its hefty $20 admission fee is waived.
Target Free Friday Nights have been drawing 5,000 to 7,000 visitors a week between 4 and 8 p.m. It’s a much younger crowd than usual: lots of college students mixing with visitors in their 20s and 30s. Plus a smattering of visitors from foreign countries.
“You see every fashion and style imaginable,” says Rachel Goldsmith, a waitress in the bustling Terrace 5 cafe that specializes in rich chocolate desserts. “A few minutes ago, there was this Willy Wonka character wearing a hat and long coat.”
The Bar Room, where the Giorgio Armani and Manolo Blahnik crowd hangs out, is jumping. Anyone lucky enough to snag a seat in the lounge gets a close-up view of a huge photographic mural by Thomas Demand of Germany.
That’s the great thing about this place. There’s art everywhere, not just in the galleries but in all the public spaces. A towering Barnett Newman sculpture, Broken Obelisk, greets visitors in the lobby. A colorful Sol LeWitt wall drawing guides visitors from the Sculpture Garden to the Bar Room, which is part of an upscale restaurant dubbed the Modern. More works await visitors as they get off the escalator or step out of an elevator.
The soaring atrium lobby is a spectacle in itself. You can see all the way up to the sixth floor and watch people riding the escalator.
MoMA’s a bargain at any price, given its world-renowned collection of modern paintings and sculptures, which is the largest anywhere.
Textbook examples abound: Monet’s “Water Lilies,” Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” Picasso’s “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon,” Cezanne’s “Bather,” Salvador Dali’s “Persistence of Memory,” Jackson Pollock’s “One.”
And MoMA owns fabulous prints, drawings and photos, has a top-notch department of architecture and design, and ventures into new media.
The claustrophobic feeling in the old building is a thing of the past. There’s plenty of room to stand back and look at the art, even during peak hours. The new Contemporary Galleries on the second floor are huge, suitable for powerful works dating from 1970 to the present, many of monumental scale.
The outdoor Sculpture Garden, home to works by Picasso, Miro, Moore, Calder, Judd and many more, is beautiful at this time of year.
The new building has space for temporary exhibits too.
A Lee Friedlander photography show and an exhibit of paintings by Cezanne and Pissarro opened last month.
It’s hard to squeeze all of this in during four hours, but it helps if one uses one of the free monthly calendars and maps available at the front desk. MoMA’s film series is almost as famous as its collection, and seats fill up fast on Fridays.
Be prepared to wait if you arrive before the gates open at 4.
Lines snake around the block starting about 3:30, but the crowd thins as the evening wears on.
Most Friday nighters come for “the freebie,” as Lewis Kachur, an associate professor at Kean University in Union, N.J., calls it. He used to bring his classes often, but the increased cost of admission made that prohibitive. There’s a bit of a price break for students, but his group still has to pay train fare into the city.
Some brush aside the free admission, opting for early arrival to beat the crowds. Johannes Smees, a retired art teacher from France, was there when the museum opened at 11 a.m. and was still going strong at 7.
“I’m happy to pay the $20,” he said. “This place is great!”
For more information, call: 212-708-9400; www.moma.org.
