We are standing in front of a group of giant ceramic pumpkins on the third floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. They are glazed and quite pretty, plump orange bellies, curly green stalks. Probably needed a giant kiln. I can see the how. I just can’t see the why.
“What do you think?” I am trying. Gamely. Trying.
“I think it’s a pumpkin,” my ten year old son says. He has been bribed with bubble tea at the end of this expedition, which is the only reason for his stunning lack of regular complaint and anarchy.
“Uh-huh,” I say, nodding. Let’s try for some insight. “And what does it say to you?”
“It says ‘pumpkin’,” he replies patiently.
Well. I accept defeat. There’s been a lot of defeat as we travel the floors of modern art. I am not a modern artist. Nor am I an ancient artist. In fact, I’m quite artistically useless in all eras. I’ve never drawn a cat which couldn’t be mistaken for a cow. I have no idea what anything means. I just don’t want my kids beholden to my own limitations.
I don’t know what art is, but I know what a pumpkin is.
“Fantastic,” I say with determination. We’re now in front of a canvas with a grid on it. “What does this one say to you?”
“It says we should have stayed in Australia.”
More determination is necessary. I stride the maze of rooms with ruthless gusto, my family trailing despondently in my wake.
By the fifth floor, our feet are aching. We sit in front of a video on loop, listening to a Chinese-American photographer tell his story. He’s rather funny, to my surprise. He grew up in SF, visited China, took thousands of pictures but held only a few close to his heart. I know what that’s like, a foot across two cultures, belonging to nowhere. I’m not sure how he makes a living. Do people buy his photos? Often enough to feed himself?
“Would you like to become a photographic artist?” I ask.
“Maybe!” says the baby, my five year old son. My eldest stares out the window, into the great open expanse of the world outside this museum which holds his bubble tea.
On the sixth floor there is a bridge of light, thousands of coloured glass chips creating a mosaic of hues. The little one runs back and forth across the glass. Just beyond, a shimmering curtain of translucent glass beads invites a game of hide and seek.
“What does it say to you?” I ask them both, but they’re wrapped up in the beads and don’t hear me.
There’s an embroidered jellyfish, and hyper-realistic canvases that look like you can step into them. I don’t know how they do that. There’s a 30-foot moving stingray and an entire wall of graffiti.
“That’s just vandalism,” I suggest.
“No it’s not!” my eldest son says. I forgot, he’s doing street art as an elective. He was pissed off when he discovered that no actual street art would be occurring as part of the class – I think he had high hopes of being given a spray can and let loose on the underpass – but apparently he’s not choosing the side of law and order just yet.
On the seventh floor, we walk into a musical installation – more than a dozen videos, musicians playing in completely separate rooms – synched perfectly so that they are playing a single piece of music. The chorus is a weird phrase in English, a collection of semi-random words repeated so often and intensely I wonder if they’re code for something.
“I know these guys! They’re Icelandic,” says my husband.
Ah, that explains that then. We sit in a huge room in the dark, watching cellos, guitar, violins, drums and an occasional cannon blast. My husband is ecstatic. I don’t know what my kids have gotten out of this, but at least he’s happy. After twenty minutes of Icelandic warbling, my ten year old gets to his feet and joins in. “Buuuuuuuuubb-ble teeeeeeeaa,” he howls.
The second assay is six days and 241 miles later. Hearst Castle sits at the very heart of the California coastline, gazing west out over the sapphire waters of the Pacific Ocean, the tail of Big Sur mountain range rising up behind it. We park next to the tourist centre and are taken up to the castle by bus.
“Is there bubble tea at the top?” the kids want to know.
“No. Hush.”
We are given a tour guide, erupting out of the sea of orange blossoms like a dapperly-turned out Venus. This castle, she desperately wants us to know, is not what it seems (a testament to hubris in the roaring twenties) but one of the great works of humanity by a wonderful man, William Randolph Hearst.
We trail across spectacular views from every aspect, while the tour guide outlines the forward-thinking visionary that Hearst was. We know this because he employed actual women to write his magazines, usually about woman-stuff like housekeeping and babies and staying svelte and cheerful while your husband cheats on you.
Hearst collected art from around the world, but the real draw here is the architecture. The castle is a blend of real and fake, the gaps hastily pasted over in a convincing facade. The inside is heavy and medieval, but the gardens are a triumph – lush and fragrant, a serene blend of formal and relaxed. In one courtyard, a statue of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet stands, black and pitted by time and weather.
“This statue is an antiquity, estimated to be 3,500 years old,” our tour guide says.
Wow. I think about the hands that carved this, hands belonging to an artist who lived in a time so far distant, it almost seems make-believe. No name or image endures of that human being. Only this creation.
“What will be remembered of us, three thousand years from now?” I ask the boys. They are playing with the fountain in the sunlight, and don’t care to ponder questions of mortality and eternity.
I don’t know what art is, but it would be nice to have a piece of me live forever.
Hearst collected people like he collected exotic animals, poets, politicians, zebras, polar bears, starlets and cattle all herded together for their entertainment value. His wife gave him an improbable number of children before he parked her somewhere on the east coast and hosted lavish parties here with his new starlet. He went bankrupt before the castle was finished, which I had already assumed since the polar bears.
“Bears is expensive,” I say, quoting Paddington.
“I want to go to London next,” says my youngest, a die-hard Paddington fan.
London will have to wait. The last stop for my budding art aficionados will be the Getty Center in Los Angeles. A cunning little tram lifts us carefully above the smog and pollution to the giant galleries, glass and chrome sparking in the sun. I was here at the age of twenty, improbably thin and insecure. I think I was wearing a hat. I try to catch a glimpse of her, my former self, shrinking in past doorways, unwilling to take up space.
“BOOBS!” shrieks the baby, overcome with admiration with a Renaissance representation of the female form.
I feel like I’m doing something right. Room spills into room, portraits, sculptures, photographs, antiquities, architecture, every new piece is a treasure. Renoir lives here, Degas, Van Gogh. A painting of a spectacularly beautiful French dame who seduced royalty and was an infamous spy. A photograph of an ancient, hauntingly twisted oak, where hangings were rumoured to have taken place among its branches.
There’s a special exhibit all about blood, which the little one adores. He laughs over a glass case of ancient blood-letting devices. We find out that the portrait of DNA is beautiful all by itself. We move on.
The kids mosey around, poking at one thing, turning their back on another. I’m not sure what they’re getting out of this. If they’re getting anything out of this. But it’s important. Somehow. My husband takes a thousand pictures of 400 year old parquetry. It takes hours.
I sigh, and buy everybody fizzy drinks. I hope the sugar gives us energy, but it makes us cranky instead. We move through impressive formal gardens, where a small girl on a microphone defiantly delivers her spoken word performance. Like so much in America, it’s both abysmal and heartfelt, and we can’t help but applaud.
“No more art!” My eldest son declares. His arms are crossed and he looks ready to kick something, but we go back in to the galleries anyway.
“This one!” the little one howls with glee, and spreads his arms up as if to hug the canvas. As he wants, I take his photo. “It’s lots of blobs, but also a building.”
“That’s right,” I say tiredly. My feet ache again. “A few hundred years ago people started painting in blobs, to catch the quality of light better. They called it Impressionism.”
“How do blobs catch the light?”
“I don’t know.” I really don’t know. “Does this look like morning blobs or evening blobs to you?”
“It’s sunrise,” he says with supreme confidence.
The final gallery is a gift shop. “We buy nothing!” I shout as usual, as my family ignores me. My eldest son moves past the scarves and souvenirs, the pencils and paints, and stops, quivering, in front of the book shelves.
“What is it?” I ask, but then I see it too. An enormous book, black with embossed silver letters, 170 pages, full colour. The L.A. Graffiti Black Book.
“I don’t care,” he says, so I buy it.
I don’t know what art is, but I do know when my kids are lying.
We’re falling asleep in the uber on the way home. “What was your favourite piece?” I ask, but my eldest son ignores me. He’s clutching the book to his chest, staring out the car window, taking in the spray-paint galleries on the underpasses of Los Angeles.
“My blob painting,” says the little one, taking possession of everything in the world that he loves.
I pull up the photo I took on my phone. I’ve caught the museum label next to it, and I zoom in on it. It’s The Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light, by Claude Monet.
“I don’t know art, my darling,” I say. “But maybe you do.”
