Care for a cosmo to go with the cosmos? The Met’s serving $18 cosmopolitans — and Manhattans, martinis and a bevy of beers and soft drinks — on its roof garden, where the museum just unveiled its latest work of art.
Alicja Kwade’s “ParaPivot” is a thing of beauty — its highly polished, colored orbs leaning on or balancing between intersecting steel beams. Actually, it’s two things: The larger metal structure has five stone balls; the smaller, four. Weighing roughly 700 to 3,400 pounds each, these nine spheres suggest the solar system. And since they’re divided between two frames, perhaps the possibility of a parallel universe.
Met curators are hailing it as a “celestial installation” and an “intergalactic ballet.” You can call it whatever you like when you post a pic on Instagram.
Walk around it and you’ll notice how the beams frame different parts of the sprawling city skyline. The orbs themselves, each one mined from a different country, are as richly veined as marble, and come in many colors: A medium-sized sphere of blue and green looks suspiciously like planet Earth.
All told, “ParaPivot” is a lot more pleasing to the eye than last year’s “We Come in Peace,” which had a 12-foot-tall, totem-like figure that looked as if it came out of a Grade Z sci-fi flick.
This isn’t Kwade’s first work for New York. In 2015, the Polish-born, Berlin-based artist produced what looked like a tipsy, 19th-century street clock. Standing tall at the 59th Street entrance to Central Park, “Against the Run,” as that Public Art Fund commissioned piece was called, was no ordinary clock: Its face revolved counter-clockwise, as did the hour and minute hands, while the second hand stayed still — and yet, amazingly, it told the correct time.
Issues of time and space have long consumed the 40-year-old Kwade (pronounced kway-dee), who’s said she’s been inspired by “Brave New World” novelist Aldous Huxley, physicist Richard Feynman and Houdini.
“A work of art begins when I fail to understand something,” she once said.
We’ll drink to that.
“ParaPivot” runs through Oct. 27. Open weather permitting, 1000 Fifth Ave., MetMuseum.org. Fridays and Saturdays, the roof garden and bar are open from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
