No Free Lunch

There's no such thing as free lunch, and there's even a theorem that says so. Nevertheless, hapless and innocently naive as we are, we walked to the Guggenheim for the "Pay what you want" ticket entrance (available every saturday, 5:45-7:45pm). Needless to say, half of New York had the same brilliant idea. We saw the queue in front of the building and decided to put ourselves in the line while we waited for Virginia and Fred to arrive, so we walked by the people waiting, turned around the corner, walked along the museum block, still people, turned around the corner again, walked along the museum block, turned around the corner again, yet more people, we walked our way almost to the end of the building again, which would have brought us full circle to the entrance of the museum, there the line ended and we could probably have put ourselves in line at that point, and maybe by next week we would have had our "pay what you want" tickets.

We were not the only ones finding the situation funny, and in very newyorky spirit, people started chatting and joking about the queue situation. Our friends arrived and we all agreed that we were not going to do the line, and will be visiting the James Turrell installations another time, and probably pay full price for it.

Nevertheless, to avoid Museum Sadness, we decided to walk south about 500m to the MET, where we saw a peculiar exhibition by Ken Price, and, incidentally, paid what we wanted (as the MET always functions on that interesting business model). We went for a beeline through ancient and modern art to get to the contemporary part of the museum, quite conscious of our appalling disregard for masterpiece after masterpiece of painting and sculpture. We passed by Modigliani and O'Keefe without a second glance, but we did slow down, on our way back, for a Hopper or two, with the knowledge that we are artistically spoiled in this city.

The highlight of the evening was our arrival on the MET rooftop terrace, with a mind-blowing view of Manhattan and the park at sunset, and the realisation that we are in a city of beauty, of art, of thought, where you can get away with spurning great artwork today because you're living 15 minutes away from it and you can just come back whenever you fancy. And pay what you want at the entrance to boot.

There might be no free lunch, but dessert is sometimes complimentary!