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NYC’s Weirdest New Museum
“Encounter” the Memor for a quirky minute or two
As I stride the streets of Manhattan, I’m always on the lookout for weird NYC. I document as I walk: anything at all that stands out from the general chaos of the city as particularly unusual will warrant a Tweet (#yourdailyweird) or a photo or a post of some kind on one of my many, many social media accounts.
So it’s no wonder that this shiny metallic statue of a weird ancient guy caught my eye. What was unusual was that he led me to discover a brand-new museum. Open less than a month on the upper East Side, the subject matter was Asian art — of what specificity I was soon to discover.
On this spectacularly crisp November afternoon, I had just dropped some out-of-town visitors at the steps of the Met Museum, and was reluctantly wandering towards the subway to go home. But the architecture of NYC was too beautiful to abandon for the cement tunnels of the 4 train just yet; the sky was flawlessly azure and every granite gargoyle and limestone cornice stood out as if a designer had chosen to feature it with an intense pinlight of some warm wash that reminded them of golden treasure in Spanish pirate movies.