Harry Lee | A new varsity sport?

A hectic, slightly hapless afternoon in New York is behind me.

Smartsave map in hand, I made it to the U.N. building two minutes after it closed to visitors; a clutch of taxi drivers refused my fare; and I took the sweltering 456 subway line to the Whitney Museum of American Art arriving at 5:10 p.m - it closes at 6:00 p.m.

I spent 10 minutes by the cloakroom listening to the attendants flirt before they finally designed to take my coat.

Twelve minutes later, tired and utterly fed up, I invented the sport of "museum running." I hoped to cover five floors of contemporary art in half an hour. The gods scoffed, but I refused to balk. I dashed up the stairs: The first-ever museum race began.

A friendly reminder: Museum racing is an extreme sport. If you're pregnant, suffer from epilepsy or a chronic heart disease, you should first consult a physician.

But what's the rush?

First, in release: Contemporary art galleries alienate and oppress viewers. Curators offer casual viewers - anyone without a degree in art history - cryptic synopses of each work, which explain nothing. Intellectual thuggery masks the emptiness of much on the walls.

Museum running allows you to cold shoulder a museum bent on excluding you. You need pay no attention to the intellectual bullshit that cakes the white-washed walls. If a work of art catches your eye while running, stop - or jog on the spot - to ponder it. Linger or dismiss it. Once satisfied, set off again.

Use and dominate a museum. Otherwise you'll be bludgeoned to death by sentences made up of more abstract nouns than consonants (It's ironic that art intended to undermine aesthetic elitism only spawns criticism that further confuses the public.).

Second, in power: Undermining the ostentation of the gallery and its stooges by prancing through installations and skipping past paintings confers a sense of masterdom.

A word of warning: Museum running may appeal to bohemian gallery-goers - types that intrude upon others by fashioning an orb of intensity containing a blizzard of way-out thoughts that dance like snowflakes in a snow globe.

Perhaps, they'll join you. No matter - anything to lighten the tone. Equipped with disciples, a pleasing messianic verve may grip you as well.

Museum running is not for the faint of heart. You form the vanguard of a revolution, comrades. If asked to stop running, I suggest:

1) Offer to buy a postcard of some wire bent by Alex Calder (His work is currently displayed on the mezzanine level at Whitney.). If you hint that you're an aficionado and a possible benefactor too, you can do anything you want.

2) Rail against any rules that constrain your response to a work of art. Explain to any apparatchiks that not only are you left emotionally frustrated, but the artists' works are frustrated too. Everybody knows that many pieces aim to elicit artless "performance works" from viewers. A potential well-spring of uninhibited creativity - perhaps worth taping and displaying in its own right - is plugged by fascist regulations.

Museum running may not be for everyone. If you gallery-schmooze as a dating tactic, meeting at the Whitney in sweatpants with a bottle of Gatorade may not be ideal.

If you idle in galleries like a mannequin in a shop window, dripping with eccentricity and aloofness for sale, then it's clear that staying still is best.

I hope museum running will catch on, at least as a form of protest, if not as part of a healthy lifestyle, like wholegrain cereal.

Perhaps try it out at Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) here at Penn. Admission is free for students, so take time out from Pottruck gym one evening and run around ICA's Ensemble exhibition. Apparently, some works are "triggered by motion detectors ... [and] will create an ambient sound environment." Rock on.

Art galleries, especially those that are publicly subsidized, bear a responsibility to gently induct the public into the world of contemporary art. So credit to the National Gallery in London, which displayed copies of the masterpieces it owns on street corners around Soho this summer. Sadly, other museums are yet to follow suit. Art museums ought to engage the public - and until they try, I intend to jog through them . or just straight past.

Harry Lee is a second-year Economics Ph.D. candidate from Portsmouth, England. His e-mail address is lee@dailypennsylvanian.com. The Pondskater appears on alternating Wednesdays.

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