Growing up I used to take the commuter train into Grand Central Station on weekends to hang out at the Museum of Modern Art, where I saw art so important it had its own tote bag. Even more alluring were the girls from brand-name schools in Manhattan like Chapin and Brearley sketching the art, and I’d return to my middleclass suburb glowing from a day spent among beautiful people and listening to five different languages. It seems that the cost of looking back, however, has gone up. I’m sitting in the lobby now of the renovated museum after paying $20 for the privilege of seeing the Richard Serra retrospective. Yoshio Taniguchi, architect of the recent expansion, promised that with enough money – more than 400 million dollars in this case – he could make the building itself disappear. He didn’t quite manage it, though he dressed the space in tasteful modern accoutrements, the towering wall behind me rough and white in contrast with the smooth black on the other side, both of them floating a fraction of an inch off the floor. To see the steel girders holding up the building would be gauche amid such refinement. One only sees steel as art in a place like this.

I enter the garden to see Richard Serra’s Intersection II, four curved steel panels like a double parentheses wedged between the trees. The parabola cuts across the checkerboard marble floor like a crude in-law, cracking tiles and staining them with rust. Inside Torqued Ellipse IV I notice the shadow of tree branches and bird shit speckling the steel, along with sneaker marks a few feet off the ground, reminding me of the day Chris Furtak scuffed up the walls of our sixth grade bathroom with his black-soled boots. The torqued side of the ellipse is tall enough to create some shade, and I end up huddling there with other patrons, staring back through the narrow opening as if stuck inside a priest’s collar.

On the second floor, sponsored by Louis Vuitton, Serra’s pieces overwhelm the space as I suppose they’re meant to, and people crowd in the corners or queue up to explore the art. I gaze at the undulating curves of Torqued Torus Inversion and Sequence, the last curve angled so alarmingly I imagine a dyke in the Lower Ninth ward before giving way. Then it’s onto Delineator, where I stand on a piece of steel and look up at another panel secured perpendicular to it on the ceiling, concerned suddenly about the weight-bearing limit of the building’s hidden beams. Not everyone is alarmed, though. A woman stands next to me with a Macy’s bag consulting a guide book. It’s the first art work I’ve seen that you can stand on and read about at the same time.

From the middle of Equal Parallel in the next gallery, where steel partitions stand about four feet high, I see what looks like the heads of patrons rolling by on the other side. Then onto Circuit II, where four steel plates bisect the room like an X, forcing me and those patrons – their bodies finally re-attached – into an odd interaction as if we’d suddenly encountered a four way stop and had to figure out who should pass first.

The last gallery conjures another time: a rubber mat folded like half a Möbius strip, foreshadowing Serra’s shapes in steel. Metal plates, now human sized, scattered next to woodblocks, as if Santa’s elves just took lunch. Troughs like charred wood from an archeological dig so old one imagines Noah floated down the Nile in one of them. Then, at last, four pieces of lead four feet square leaning against each other. I kneel down by the glass partition and can almost imagine myself inside, impossibly small, peering up at the mammoth walls.

Other Essays and Stories In:

The Saint Ann's Review (forthcoming)
Poets & Writers, Jan/Feb 2012
The Saint Ann's Review, Tenth Anniversary Issue, Fall 2011
The Missouri Review, Fall 2010
The Saint Ann's Review, Fall 2009
The Saint Ann's Review,Summer/Fall 2004
Circle Magazine, Issue 20, Winter 2002
The Pacific Review, Volume 18, 2000
Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, February 1994

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It seems the English Pub Hook has invaded stores everywhere. Have you seen them? They're deceptively simple things: a mirror, a frame, and a row of hooks, where, legend has it, the English would hang their whatevers before ordering that pint of ale.

I first noticed the English Pub Hook at my local Pottery Barn. God, I love that store. Shopping there sends a signal to professional women in my neighborhood that I am a man of taste. The fact that I've never bought anything at the Pottery Barn doesn't matter. After all, thousands of women have seen me admire the English Pub Hook on Saturday afternoons, but no one has ever stood in my apartment and removed a piece of clothing. I suppose that makes the Hook the very definition of a luxury item—a thing I'm desperate to buy, display in my home, and never ever use.

In some ways, my shopping habits are a version of the American dream. I don't come from a Pottery Barn family. I clawed my way there. My sister, for example, is still a few levels beneath me in the chain chain, and she's not in a hurry to move up. She's what I call an Egalitarian Shopper. She likes a store that looks like America, where she can push her cart down an aisle full of screaming babies because Mom disappeared head first into the bargain bin. Good ol' Sis. She likes to be one of the crowd. And likes her apartment to look like one of a crowd. Which is why I took her to Wal-Mart recently to purchase some mass-produced, socially inclusive items for her apartment.

Now, you're not going to believe this, but as I browsed in Wal-Mart that day near a poster of Monet's Water Lilies I turned to find—you guessed it— a row of English Pub Hooks. The same ones offered at the Pottery Barn. My head swam. I called for a cappuccino, which I always do in times of crisis. My entire world view, which ranked consumer goods, stores, streets, girlfriends, colleges, neighbors, and their pets using an objective formula developed by US News & World Report—the very idea that one thing could be worth more than another—was collapsing right in front of me.

How did these stupid hooks get here, anyway? It took Monet 100 years to move from the salon to the discount store. If nothing else, it was clear that useless items were no longer the privilege of the well-to-do. Luxury was invading bargain basements at a faster and faster rate. It had probably taken minutes for a Wal-Mart executive to spy that English Pub Hook in his neighborhood Pottery Barn and jump on the latest trend in coat hanging.

It was then that I had the most painful realization. I'd been duped. I'd planned to furnish my apartment with limited edition things. I was going to pay full price. Now, the sad reality was that I could invite people over for a soiree or some other kind of French activity, and they'd hang up their coats and still not know for sure if I was a Pottery Barn kind of guy. God, I'm dizzy just thinking about it.

Clearly, a corporate marketing department had decided that everyone would benefit from the English Pub Hook. Now. Immediately. And with our vaunted manufacturing and distribution system—truly our nation's gift to posterity—hooks were arriving at stores across this land just-in-time, just-for-you, just-because.

I stood in Wal-Mart that afternoon and wondered where our one-taste-fits-all culture had gotten us. Let's face it. No one actually needs an English Pub Hook—unless you sell beer in England. So I did the only thing a rational consumer could do. I bought one. And though I impressed a lot of women in the checkout line that day, it hasn't exactly changed my life. It's hanging on the wall, still waiting to be used.

—Bulk Head, Spring 2002