Art Appreciation

The Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo is neither large, nor popular, nor exciting and thus seems to me an almost perfect museum. 420 yen—cheaper than a coffee with aspirations—admits one to the permanent collection. Every season the exhibit is changed, but only partially, so that after three or four visits the art is 80% familiar and may, if you are quiet and lucky, allow itself to be seen.

The overarching trend in Japanese art is that painters live either to their thirties or to their nineties, with almost no dying in between. I have no idea how this is enforced.

After many meetings and with mounting embarrassment, I begin to remember names. I start, of course, with the best-looking. Ai-mitsu, staring with his square-jaw out of his self-portrait of 1944. If I were so handsome, I’d paint myself too. Or Sazo Wada’s South Wind, men on a raft, a pink skinned man with a tousled blue shirt over his head and his brawny chest exposed. An orange rag around his loins beneath his navel. Any minute now the wind will whip it off. All of us on the raft will have at him.

Admittedly, my art appreciation skills are still embryonic. I like sex, and also I like solitude. To move in a large empty room where almost nothing is happening is a luxury virtually unknown in Tokyo.

The best place in the museum is a lounge on the 4th floor. A bare room, hospital bright, with hard chairs. A vending machine hums in the corner. An enormous window looks out on the moat around the Imperial Palace. The water is the same dense green as the evergreens. Snow clings to the stones of the moat wall long after it has gone from every other place.

I like to sit in this bright empty room and drink a hot can of tea until I am empty and resonant. Nothing in my head but pictures and a hum.