**Fine Art Friday**

Last week Lo and I went on a very fulfilling date...if only she were a dude!

First, we checked out The Whitney. On Friday nights, from 6-9 PM, it's pay what you want. Now, personally, I think $5 minimum donation is acceptable but walking up and saying "So it's free, right?" is not so much. But that's just me.

At any rate, we went to see the William Eggelston photography exhibit, and got an extra bonus with the Alexander Calder exhibit.

Eggelston is one of my favorite photographers, mainly because his composition is so poised, that even though he takes pictures of the often mundane, his images are still gorgeous. He was one of the first fine art photographers to shoot in color and his process (which I don't fully understand so I won't extrapolate here) makes it so the colors pop vibrantly. It's not so much that the saturation is pushed, it's that the color is part of the story.

As for Calder, I was so pleasantly surprised by this exhibit. I'd never heard of him before, but his fame comes from all the wire sculptures he did (a lot of them were dubbed the first "mobiles"), but what made the exhibit so fantastic was all the toys he handmade and the full functioning circus he fashioned out of wire, cloth and other materials. The best part was that the circus "performers" were actually functional, thus being one of the first "performance art" pieces ever constructed. And lucky for myself and the other adults and children in attendance, this performance art didn't involve a naked person smearing themselves with feces.

These images don't do the exhibit justice, there are wire sculptures hung so that the light hits them and makes beautiful silhouttes on the wall. And the circus is shown on video performed by Calder himself.

I highly recommend both exhibits. Lauren and I left with Eggelston postcards, and I almost never buy anything at museum gift shops anymore.