I haven’t been seeing much art lately. I missed Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim and then Louise Bourgeois right after that. I still haven’t gotten a membership at MOMA. But I did make it to the Brooklyn Museum’s 10th Anniversary party and the opening of the Gilbert & George show.

BM’s First Saturdays are probably one of the best monthly events in the city: the range of people who flood the museum each time is impressive. You might find a crowd out front for a marching band and hoards of kids wearing handmade 10th anniversary crowns waiting in line for cake.

As for the Gilbert & George retrospective, their work certainly has a span with thirty years of collaboration, though in many ways they just seem do the same things in slightly different ways. I found myself drawn more to the lo-fi works — including a series of large drawings with comic-style captions and smaller printed works in the first gallery. Of their photo-montages, I gravitated to the older ones, like the melancholy Dead Boards series. The black and white photography and occasional hand-painted color was more aesthetically pleasing than their later digital montages, which show heavy Photoshop filter abuse. Not to mention that some of those later works are just plain creepy. It might just be that those earlier works are far more subtle, looking at their lives through simpler lenses.