Connections/City

My name is Ryan Wong, I work in the exhibitions office at the Metropolitan Museum, and I'm going to be talking about the city. I was

born and raised in Los Angeles, and I lived there until the end of high school, so that's my home, that's what I'll always sort of refer to as "the city" in my head, and now I live in New York.

So very early on, this was in middle school, I had a teacher who told me that if you are ever bored in a city, you are boring.

And what he meant by that was that if you cannot find something to do it means there's something wrong with you, you're just not trying hard enough. And I think I sort of took that to heart.

So I've always lived in a city, I probably will always live in a city, and part of that is because he was right.

When I walk down the street in New York and I see the person with the Mohawk next to the banker in the pinstripe suit, that is something that can only happen in cities. You have such a dramatic division of

tasks in the city, that you meet people who are part-time baristas and part-time freelance writers.

You meet people who just prepare flowers for a living. You meet people who just do eyebrows for a living.

You meet people who just take care of dogs for a living. You can also be an artist, because it is a very particular and strange skill.

And I think artists realize this and they pay tribute to the city in their art.

Rome plays this sort of amazing backdrop to the drama of this scene. You know, everyone knows Rome through images in movies and paintings, and for me it's sort of reality-effect, that it's the same city, and what gets washed away is of course all the violence of this scene.

The city outlasts the people that live in it. We still have that physical artifact, even though we don't have any of the human life that took place in front of it.

The city is always a stage for everyone. We're always on when we're in the city. And anyone who's ever taken the subway, they know this experience

of looking at people and seeing them at their most off-guard. You really, I think, learn something about their character. You know how this lady's day was; it was tiring. You can picture sitting across from this guy reading the newspaper; he couldn't care less whether this lady next to him lived or died. He is interested in his own thing.

In New York you are physically, viscerally up against other people, and we just have this amazing ability to pretend that that's not happening, that I'm not touching this stranger. The city builds

that in you, it forces you to be blasé about the overwhelming amount of stimulation that comes at you every minute you live in New York.

In L.A. you're in your car and the most you do is look into the window of the person driving next to you. I remember when I first moved to

New York a couple of years ago, I would just walk for miles because it was such a novel experience to me.

I love The Block because just like when you're walking down a street in New York, you can peer into the lives of the people on the block.

There's everything from this assumption into heaven going on in this church

to people hanging out on the street corner, to

a couple making love in bed, to two children sort of gazing out the window forlornly.

And of course this can all be happening at the same time, mere feet away from each other.

This shows New York as I've always been told it was back then, that is, New York in the seventies was tough, it was gritty, there was more crime, there were more drugs. But at the same time, there's a lot of romance that's attached to that.

I think living in a city is by nature nostalgic. You become attached to the city the same way you become attached to a person. I don't want to gloss over the

dangers and negative sides of a city. You know, cities are home to a lot of poverty, a lot of crime, a lot of inequality, but unlike in the countryside, literally everything

you see in a city was put there by a human being. Everything you can point to in a city is there for a reason, because of

human needs and desires. And you can really read who we are as people by

taking a minute and looking around you in the city.