One good thing about having your beach house renovated over Memorial Day weekend is that it gives you time to really enjoy the city's cultural attractions without the usual hoi polloi getting in your way - just well-mannered tourists stalking every attraction in a slow-moving, fanny-pack and flip-flop brigade.
So I set off to the Upper East Side again to visit museums, this time the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, in the landmark Andrew Carnegie Mansion on Fifth Avenue, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, further south.
At the Cooper-Hewitt is Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500–2005, which addresses "the development of utensil forms, innovations in production and materials, etiquette, and flatware as social commentary." You might think that the history of silverware is an esoteric subject, but to judge by the number of people who were fixated by every piece, it may be underexamined. Upstairs is Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape, an exhibition of painters who romanticized the country's pristine beauty. The idea here is not just to highlight beautiful landscape paintings, but to show how they contributed to tourism. Each room is organized around a popular vacation destination, such as Niagara Falls or the Catskills, and offers a historical look at what tourists would find there and how these places were memorialized.
Over at the Met, which was open today thanks to our mayor, is Girodet: Romantic Rebel, a retrospective devoted to Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson, the apparently arrogant pupil of Jacques-Louis David. Here I saw many paintings that were familiar from art survey classes, though for some reason they were all hung at the eye level of an NBA All-Star. Girodet's artistic reputation is still being debated: some call him a good comeback story, while others think he might be better left forgotten. I'm not so picky about my Romantic painters - I loved it.
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