A New York City diary entry.

Why do we think that art can only live in the sterile rooms of a museum? What about dirty subway stations and busy street corners?

I scribbled down some thoughts about this while waiting for the train last summer in New York.

[JUNE 7, 2022] Writing this while standing on edge of the platform, waiting for the B-train. Hot wind is blowing through my hair and dancing with my dress and I feel something. Every time I feel something, and each time it is unexpected. The tunnels and the wind that travels through them while traveling through me. The wind that blows these pages as I write upon them. It sounds like it’s alive. It sounds like it’s talking to me and like it might just have everything to say about the worlds that it has seen. It has not been silenced or cleaned or marketed to the world as art. It just is. Like a beautiful person who doesn’t know quite how beautiful they are.

See, I was just at the MoMA and I was walking around slowly, gazing into the art, around the art, looking wherever one looks to try and feel something. To extract meaning. To see your own humanity reflecting off the walls. Because its the MoMA and that’s what you do and it’s great. But you know it’s great. You know this before you even get inside. It’s going to be beautiful. You expect to be moved. You expect to be subtly transformed in the million tiny ways that all great art promises to subtly transform you in. And there is something very cool, but exhausting about that. The pressure to be amazed is ever immense. It’s like standing in front of the Colosseum in Rome when you really just want to sit on a random street and watch the Roman world go by, organically. You want to see something that can’t be found on a postcard.

And when I walked out of the museum on onto the street, I saw it all. I descended the subway stairs and breathed in the warm metallic air that it never fails to offer, and felt more authentically amazed than I did all day floating around the rooms of that museum. And as I stood there beneath a peeling ceiling above a littered train track, I saw nothing short of organic art. The subway systems in New York, the filthy worlds that run beneath the shiny city, are the true displays of humanity. Look no further to find your truth, your connection to this world. They are the most beautiful museums that I have ever seen, ones that millions of people contribute to everyday without even thinking about it. It’s the subtly, the mundane nature of its creation that lends to its brilliance. It catches you off guard. You don’t walk into a dirty train station in the bowels of a metropolis expecting to be transformed. You save that for all the famous attractions around town, the places you were told that you have to see. But it’s the seemingly mundane that will transform you if you open your eyes. Let it.

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