Frozen, New York City

The polar vortex is here. From Maine to Michigan, people are stuck in a freezer of ice, snow and brutally cold temperatures that threaten skin and spirit. My mind flashes back to this icy guy-in-a-box, Snowman, installed in MoMA’s Outdoor Sculpture Garden last summer. The frosty copper-coated statue was a magic trick in June’s humid heat. A clever study of contrast and form by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and the late David Weiss. It amazed and amused me.

Now the extreme cold darkens my perception. I have seen the Snowman, and he is us.

Housing Crisis, Boston

My first thoughts were of Dorothy when I came across this sunflower yellow Quaker-style house askew in the Rose Kennedy Greenway in downtown Boston. Was there a dead Brahmin stuck underneath? Actually, all Oz allusions were accidental, according to Brooklyn artist Mark Reigelman. He created this art piece, "The Meeting House," from traditional building materials like Eastern white cedar and birch plywood to reference both the residential disruption caused by highway infrastructure projects and the healing qualities of communal civic structures.

As work and chores migrate to the web, I think places where people can gather and talk face to face and make progress as a community become even more appreciated. I've noticed that inviting lounges and shared worktables are super trendy, not just in expected places like hotel lobbies and coffee shops, but also in museums and even gyms. MoMA's new renovation, for example, adds 25-percent more public space, including a stunning second floor cafe and first floor lobby lounge. The stylish entrance space of my newly madeover Equinox gym fuses hotel lobby with high-tech workspace. Gym members give fingers and minds a workout while sitting at long shared work tables with electric outlets, rows of marble cafe tables or on stylish black upholstered chaise lounges. You could spend all day at the gym without breaking a sweat.

The irony is that people using these public work spaces often line up next to each other staring at glowing screens like toddlers in parallel play, communing without communicating. I call it public isolation. Perhaps if a large Meeting House landed in their midst they would put down their screens and talk to each other, which is why I think some people secretly love disasters. When you contrast Reigelman's colorful small house with the large impersonal glass skyscrapers in the distance, which one would you rather play in?

On Guards

Museum guards are an under-appreciated bunch. They're essential to protecting and preserving art, but we art lovers barely acknowledge their presence. They are trained to be inconspicuous, and we may pass right by them without seeing them. That's bad. Not only are we denying their physicality, we are also failing to notice the details of the entire picture. They, and us, deserve more.

Artist Fred Wilson's experience as a museum guard in college lead him to create a piece that put the dynamic of the hidden guard front and center.  His 1991 work "Guarded View" (now in the Whitney Museum of Art's permanent collection) shows four headless black mannequins in real uniforms from New York City museums. As Wilson remarked, "[There's] something funny about being a guard in a museum. You're on display but you're also invisible." Wilson further proved his point by showing up to give a tour of the Whitney in a guard's uniform. He was well-known in the art world at the time, but the people who eagerly awaited his tour failed to recognize him.

If museums train us to "see," shouldn't we start with the people inside them? We need to embrace an entirely new etiquette, I think, regarding our interactions with the people who help make public viewing of art possible. A polite head nod or a smile would probably do it.

Some guards are so spatially talented, you want to applaud them. At the Louise Lawler show, WHY PICTURES NOW currently at MoMA, I was struck by how the guard (photo above) made graphic performance art by inhabiting the door space under an exit sign. It reminded me of the guards in their booths at Buckingham Palace. This guard's act of geometric occupation counterbalanced the spatial relationships in Lawler's adhesive vinyl wall piece, "Triangle (traced)." Impeccably dressed in black-and-white, he extends rather than distracts from the monochrome wall piece. His white shirt beneath his blazer mirrors Lawler's triangle, and his clever positioning creates a three-dimensional triangle with the black-clad art observer as the point. Thanks to this stealth performance artist, aka museum guard, I had a stunning moment where art and life perfectly intersected.