Cultural Shivers.

A melting-pot culture in a melting-pot town.  That is artistic New York, the most diverse and dazzling cultural metropolis on earth and odds on, the richest in history.  When it comes to art, in quantity or quality, old or modern, the Big Apple puts the fabled troves of all other cities to shame, whether those of ancient Egypt, Babylon, Crete, or Rome (either imperial or baroque).  Neither Vienna under the Hapsburgs nor Paris under Napoleon collected more art, showed off more, or got a greater kick out of having it all.

Why did New York become so rich?  It is probably because of an inferiority complex.  Having started with little more than a few Indian beads and some Dutch silver and crockery, New York was driven to possess a slice of every culture on earth.  And how well they succeeded!  The New York public “owns” some five million works of art, artifacts, and cultural implements spanning fifty centuries, housed in thirty-five institutions.  Not a single decade of any civilization on earth is not represented by some worthy piece, be it a tiny, delicate gold necklace mode for a Neolithic baby princess or a salon from a 1912-15 summerhouse designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that once embellished the shored of Wayzata, in Minnesota.

Here is everything!  Achaemenian daggers, baroque arquebuses, wampum by the yard, dozens of real and not so real American weathervanes, art deco settees, a silver finger reliquary (fake, alas), staples of old masters, platoons of Rembrandts, stone carvings from the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs, seventeen tons of Paul Manships, hundreds of Limoges tureens, and a lone fur-lined coffee cup (with saucer).

Any attempt to see this incomparable welter of art would consume more than one lifetime and lead to cultural neurasthenia.  Who would want to see it all, anyway?  Only about 15 percent of the hoard is worth looking at for any more than a few seconds, and only around a very small amount is of the highest-possible level of quality-world-class in every respect-the type of thing that makes you shiver with pleasure.

Where does one go in New York to get the cultural shivers?  Which museums and cultural entities should one see, and which should one shun?  After much research and many interviews, I have compiled “Anja’s Odyssey”.  I can do it in a year, a month or in six days.  Know that an “Odyssey” was completed in two days (our friend Larissa), followed by hospitalization.

Outing 1:         
Metropolitan Museum.

Outing 2:         
Brooklyn Museum, Cooper-Hewitt Museum.

Outing 3:         
Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, Morgan Library, Jewish Museum,                                                 National Academy of Design.

Outing 4:         
New York Botanical Garden, Bronx Zoo, New York Historical Society, American Museum of Natural History.

Outing 5:         
Hispanic Society of America, The Cloisters (a personally anticipated visit).

Outing 6:        
Museum of Modern Art, Frick Collection.

Here than are 50 centuries of art, in six outings(or whatever time it will take). 

But first an excursion, with friends, to the Hudson Valley.  Great week-end y’all.