Playing hooky at the Met

I took today off and headed uptown to the Met, which is much more civilized on weekdays than on weekends. In such a gargantuan institution, I favor a tripartite approach: See the show that everyone is talking about (AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion); see the show that you really want to see (Kara Walker at the Met: After the Deluge); and choose one wild card (Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armor of Tibet). Well, that last one was my mother's choice - and it was wild for her.

AngloMania was the weirdest exhibit I've ever seen at the Met, which seemed cool until I remembered that it was sponsored by Burberry and that its opening party was a celebrity-studded outlet for Anna Wintour's ego, according to the New York Times. In English Period rooms, gowns by John Galliano, Vivienne Westwood, and other contemporary design icons mix with more traditional costumes, and the effect is wild, as if some art students had been given the run of the place.

Kara Walker is an artist I first learned about at the Walker Art Center in the 1990s - alongside other black female artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson. Walker is known for using cut-paper silhouettes, an 18th-century medium, to comment on race. For the Met exhibit, she chose paintings and objects from the museum's collection and combined them with her own work to explore the nightmarish fallout of Hurricane Katrina. I was impressed that the Met even ventured to confront the topic, but I wasn't expecting much. What could she find? Some old paintings of rivers? The little show is a lot more than that, though, especially with Winslow Homer's contribution: It's a reminder that an institution that preserves objects has a lot to teach about any cataclysmic moment in history.

An exhibition of Tibetan armor, helmets, and weapons from the 13th to the 20th centuries is not something I'd typically run out to see; I've found that the arms and armor department of the Met is usually inhabited by fathers and their preteen sons. But the examples of Himalayan ironwork in this show can be appreciated by anyone who is impressed by sheer craftsmanship. Among the usually staid placards, I was surprised to read one that gushed uncharacteristically about a pair of particularly decorative stirrups - and indeed they were stunning stirrups!