Mondays are even harder to find a show to see than Sunday nights. In fact, with most of the city’s museums closed, it was shaping up as a day without art. Until…
After breakfast, I was walking the streets around Times Square when I spied a poster for the Discovery Museum and “the world’s largest display of Lego art.” It seems there is a guy named Nathan Sawaya, a lapsed lawyer who now makes his living building mind-boggling, intricate, sculptures out of those tiny toy plastic bricks.
So I went, fully expecting it to be a campy way to kill an hour and I was soon completely enthralled with Sawaya’s output. Much of the vast exhibit it devoted to his recreations in Legos of existing major works of art by the likes of Degas, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Van Gogh. The statue of David, for instance, is painstakingly built of 16,349 Lego bricks and one of the mysterious heads on Easter Island took, we are told, 75,450 bricks. The finale of the exhibit is a huge dinosaur skeleton (80,020 bricks).
Only in New York, only in New York.
Tomorrow: Woody Allen and Susan Stroman’s Bullets Over Broadway