On Sunday I took the L train for a birthday brunch at Diner, an imaginatively-named eatery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, carved into an old restaurant car. Great apple pancakes, which I walked off wandering through the deserted streets off Bedford Avenue. Later in the afternoon, I paid my first visit to the now MoMA-affiliated contemporary art museum, P.S.1. OK, so there was (overpriced) beer and a (amateur) live band, but the overall experience was highly disappointing. Most of the work on display is what I would consider the worst of contemporary art, the kind of self-indulgent nonsense that unfairly gives Modern Art a bad name, and puts millions of people off visiting museums and galleries. I sometimes wonder if it’s just me, if I’m missing something huge, but as I watched a group of self-important Brooklyn hipsterati stare with painfully earnest contemplation at a video installation of shuffling feet I decided that whatever I was missing I didn’t really care, and I suddenly couldn’t wait to get back to Manhattan, where at least pretentious crap doesn’t pretend to be anything else.
Newyorkology 