Museum of Modern Art Highlights: Why I Want to Visit before I Die

I want to start this discussion about the Museum of Modern Art highlights with a confession: I don’t have a passport. The chance to visit different continents has come and gone with time, with every missed opportunity prompting me to say, “Oh, I’ll get another chance the next time.”

It was only after years of procrastination that I realized how badly I’ve been bitten by the travel bug. I want to leave town. Nah, I want to leave the country. I want to see what’s out there!

This yearning to come out of my rather crowded shell started when I saw a photo of the Museum of Modern Art. Even as a kid, I have always loved looking at paintings (and making a few amateurish ones of my own).

I wonder, when will game graphics ever make it to the walls of MoMA? I feel like the graphics in these games really are art!

Taking an online peek at MoMA – that’s what patrons lovingly call the place – made me realize how much of my life I am missing out on. And it’s all because I don’t have a passport. (I wonder, does the Department of Foreign Affairs have a 24-hour hotline?)

Museum of Modern Art Highlights

Kidding aside, here’s why I would love to visit the Museum of Modern Art before I hit the proverbial bucket. I just hope these reasons are enough to convince my subconscious to start digging for my birth certificate so that I can start filing for a passport!

• It’s a center of modern art located in New York. There are way too many keywords in that sentence that make me drool: art, modern, and of course, New York! I know that sounds superficial, but for someone who hasn’t left a single island of her country, it’s something to aspire for.
• The Museum of Modern Art offers movie screenings. Imagine watching an awesome movie for the first time – and imagine being surrounded by art the moment the movie is over. The immersion in beauty would have been enough to give me an endorphin overdose!
• The museum has a Rain Room that people actually line up to see. It’s art that you get to experience first-hand. You get to walk through a room where it seems to be raining, only for the rain not to fall on you when you pass by. The program was meant to selectively stop rain where people are standing. It’s like you’re surrounded by rain but you won’t get wet! (I heard the queue to get into the Rain Room is just ridiculously long, with tourists lining up for up to nine hours.)
• The Museum of Modern Art has an amazing collection, with over 150,000 paintings, sculpture, and other works of art. Wow. I wonder, will one day be enough to visit every single piece of art? If I allot ten hours of my day to visit MoMA, that means I have to look at 250 pieces of art per minute just so I don’t miss anything. (Yes, I did the math!)

One of these days, I’ll get the chance to visit MoMA. Although the Museum of Modern Art highlights mentioned above are very good reasons, there’s one more that makes me wish I could go right now: Whenever I look at a painting, it’s tantamount to seeing the world through the eyes of geniuses. New York, here I come!