By Diana Abraham

A couple of friends and I took a trip to the Big Apple— New York City. It has become a tradition of ours to take a trip for our birthdays and so far everyone has picked New York City. This time, we went to the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan. If you decide to go to the MoMA other places to visit are Carnegie Hall, Times Square, and Central Park. Central Park is a bit of a walk from the MoMA, but there is a convenient Starbucks to the right of MoMA’s entrance/exit. My friends and I walked even farther to Bryant Park, to get some breakfast, which is about eleven blocks from the MoMA, but the park was worth the trip.

Once we entered the museum, we were amazed. The art was very different from other museums we usually visit. For example, in the Guggenheim we saw more classic paintings and sculptures, but in the MoMA we saw light-displays, televisions, cars, magazines, and other non-conventional art-forms. One of my favorite exhibits was created by Marcel Broodthaers, he named it “A Retrospective.” I was interested after I went to the museum to learn that Broodthaers worked primarily as a poet until he was 40 and then turned to visual arts. He wanted to give language a materialistic form, which I believe are exemplified in his displays. He worked at a traveling museum called the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles) not as an artist but to the role of the institution itself and the function of art in society. And I realized that museums, unlike galleries, do not display paintings, sculptures, and other forms of expression for monetary purposes, rather they do it to enrich society with the benefits of art. These benefits include, but are certainly not limited to,: provoking imagination, bending the way we think, and changing the world one brushstroke at a time. And so, I encourage you to take some time to see the MoMA and this exhibit of Marcel Broodthaers’s, it will be on its way to Madrid in October of this year.