First posted on FB, Feb. 16, 2023.

I had an hour or so to spend at the Museum of Modern Art yesterday, and it occurred to me later that in my random wanderings, mostly through recent and contemporary art, I'd experienced a kind of yin/yang revelation. On the one hand there was the astounding, rather psychedelic, machine-dream digital video creation of Refik Anadol, "Unsupervised." The pulsing, wall-sized, ever-evolving blob was a kind of macro abstraction in three-dimensional motion, which (and speaking of AI) had its origins in actual MoMa imagery transformed by the computer brain. It was mesmerizing, performatively electric and extremely captivating given the quantity of phone cameras and gawkers (self included) in its presence. On the other hand there was the room that held Richard Serra's "Equal," a suite of four stacked pairs of steel cubes. This, I realized, was Anadol's opposite, an experience in solidity and stasis. Mesmerizing in its own way, it asks us to slow down and look inward. MoMA The Museum of Modern Art