Robert Goldwater Library blog: AAOA: Best of the "Best of" Lists

The AAOA galleries and objects just kept appearing in the end-of-year flurries of "Top Ten" lists. First, some unmitigated hyperbole from Jerry Saltz via New York Magazine (12/17/07), re-posted in Artnet Magazine (1/3/08):

ECSTASY MACHINE
You can have your Prado, your National Gallery, your Hermitage. New York’s magnificent Metropolitan Museum of Art is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States. It is arguably the finest institution of its kind in the world. [...]

from the list:

2. Ethiopian Illuminated Gospel, late 14th-early 15th century.

This illuminated bible is open to a full page illumination (one of 24) of the entry of Christ into Jerusalem. The image shows a Mesopotamian-like Jesus atop a donkey. He is surrounded by the 12 apostles. Each sports a brilliant yellow halo. All hover around him on a rich green ground and look at us with wild Picasso-like eyes, pulling us in on some spiritual-religious tractor beam. The space in this painting is flat, inventive, fragmented, Byzantine, visionary and captivating all at once. The geometry, composition and intense color give this illumination enormous ornamental and formal power.

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4. Papua New Guinea, Headdress Effigy (Hareiga), New Britain, Chachet Baining people, late 19th-early 20th century.

This 15-foot-long object is so powerful I sometimes imagine it has to be strapped down to prevent it from levitating through the roof of the museum into outer space and creating a force field all its own around the earth. This enormous puppet-headdress made by the Chachea Baining people of New Britain, Papua New Guinea, looks like a tree trunk with a massive swollen head. In addition to a well-formed vulva, tiny ears, stumpy legs and crooked arms, this figure sports tattooed eyes, eyebrows and a gapping mouth. She seems to hover and preside over this hall of the Met like an extraterrestrial empress emitting waves of visual, psychic and erotic power.

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5. Marshall Islands Navigational Chart (Rebbilib), late 19th-early 20th century.

This grid made of coconut midrib, sticks and fiber by the sailors of the Marshall Islands looks like something Mondrian, Richard Tuttle, Joaquin Torres Garcia or Paul Klee might have made. It is not an abstract work of formalist art. It is a tool, a map and navigational chart that records wave activity, underwater currents, ocean swells and the best ways to guide a vessel safely to shore from sea. Whatever you see it as, imagine if our maps to the moon were constructed as lyrically and physically as this.

and via The Huffington Post:

Culture Zohn: Ten Treasures of 2007
By Patricia Zohn. Posted December 21, 2007 | 02:35 AM (EST)

Number 8. Last year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art re-installed the Greco Roman galleries to much fanfare. But for my money (or rather Michael Rockefeller's), the most breathtaking gallery I've been in in a long time (and which would be touted as THE museum architectural space in any other new venue) is the central gallery for Melanesian art in the re-done Oceanic wing of the Met, capped, literally, by the ceiling from a ceremonial house of the Kwoma people of New Guinea.

More than 80 feet long and 30 feet wide, the ceiling is composed of more than 270 individual paintings, commissioned from a group of Kwoma master artists in the early 1970s. Fully installed for the first time, art and religion have met their most sacred space at the museum, an enthralling, soaring gallery which makes you HIGH!