today we'll be giving you an insider look at the metropolitan museum of art also known as the met one of the most popular attractions in new york city we'll have an art historian guiding us around showing us the most important works if your time is limited and even a few surprises you don't want to miss it this is the most visited museum in new york six million people come every year and today it feels like one million of them are here really crowded what about admissions well the good news is if you're a new york
state resident or a student in new york new jersey or connecticut you can pay what you wish otherwise it's 30 for adults 22 for seniors 17 for students and i recommend you buy the ticket in advance so crazy enough seth was actually my art history professor at rutgers he's a new york city resident and a museum expert when you go to paris you go to the louvre come to new york you come to the metropolitan museum of art it is one of the world's classiest and greatest museums and deserves to be visited by everyone if
it's your first time at the met you need to grab a map the second you walk in this will be very handy how many times do you think you've been to the met in your life twice a week for 30 years this is probably one of the most iconic rooms in the entire museum one of the most recognizable ones right absolutely the temple of dendor my god this was a gift from the egyptian government to the united states and president johnson decided between boston washington and new york that it would come here to new york
city and the humidity in here is the same humidity as the nile and it is the only egyptian temple in the united states you can't afford the plane tickets to egypt it's a little cheaper to come to the met little this is to be the nile we gotta have a crocodile and this is a nile crocodile an ancient egyptian nile crocodile no less is george washington crossing to delaware i've seen i think this is in every history book every history book that we have this is reproductive and why you come to the met is not
just that they have it but look how big it is look at the scale uh of this thing if we walk up to it we're much smaller than most of these people but it's political propaganda the event happened washington did cross the delaware on the 26th of december 1776 but do you think an older man can stand up in a rocky boat like that no unlikely artist was a german emanuel was destroyed in world war ii during american bombing and this is a copy that he made but it was ironically hired by america right and
so the um the reason uh he made this is because they were having a revolution at the time and this was the spur on their revolution i mean eight feet tall exactly this is this is remarkable this is the finest collection of american art decorative art sculpture rooms uh anywhere and it should be a must for any overseas visitor because you're not going to see this quality and quantity of american art anywhere but here so imagine in a very wealthy house going up a flight of steps and at the end of the steps this is
the window that was there first of all we have breakfast at tiffany's tiffany of the jewelry store with the blue box this is his son one of his specialties was glass and he actually in queens corona queens he created a glass factory uh where he produced colored glass and he had a team of women artists who designed this for him so we know who designed this agnes northrup and she created this autumn scene so i look at this and i instantly say something like god doesn't it look like fall fall colors doesn't look like the
sun is about to set and though this looks like it might be painted it's not it's 100 glass and he invented glass um to create uh this illusion you see it looks like confetti almost yeah it's called confetti glass and he made it and it almost looks like leaves are falling using that kind of confetti glass you can really see the quality of the glass and the color as the light comes through it and that you can only experience in a museum the colors has very uh northeastern united states absolutely let's see where he got
that motivation absolutely nope this is fall in the northeast my first intelligent statement of the day this is the single most important painting at the metropolitan museum of art it is what i would consider the mona lisa of the metropolitan museum of art it is in every single art history textbook and it is the reason you should come to a museum and that is because there are things in this painting that you will see in person that you cannot see reproduced its portrait of a young man we don't know who he is but we probably
could guess he's wealthy he's well dressed he's learned his hands in a book but what is never reproduced unless you're here in person is just you see there's a mask over to the left right in the furniture the pants area over here two eyes in the nose there's actually a mask in there also yes it's never reproduced and so you have these three masks mask over here mask in there mask over there was he part of the theater uh i was just something erudite and fancy that's why you come to this museum to be able
to see the nuances of the black and the blue and the black and then that mask and i almost defy anybody to see to show that reproduced all these pictures everything you see every room everything here this is a political statement it's not just a pretty picture of a landscape it has a meaning behind it not meaning to generate a political meaning the river comes and it loops around like that to create an oxbow it's called an oxbow if you notice on the right or the east it's all cultivated right and if you get very
close not too close that they're going to yell at us but you can see at first glance it doesn't look like there's anyone there but in fact the reason you come to the mat or to a museum is there are hundreds of people and animals and people working the fields uh very hard to see and you see smoke i mean just right in the fields right over there just amazing to see the activity that going on on the east cultivated on the on the west or the left it's wild and what thomas cole is doing
here is a political statement he is saying that the america is eating up its land and it's creek it's cultivating it and this though it looks positive to us for his statement it was negative that that land is being wasted used and the wild land that you see over here this is the garden of eden um is wild that's what america really is or was that is an ionic column i learned that in his class i never forgot the difference between ionic doric and corinthian columns because of this man right here yeah right this is
the met kuros and okoros is a standing young male uh nude now let me say something right away if i took off my clothes and stood in front of you i'd be naked i'd be ashamed ben's camera would break and it would be awful besides being arrested but this guy is not naked he's nude he is in a natural state he is heroic and that's what the greeks believed in is this kind of heroic nudity anyway why is this so important why is it in every survey of art history textbook in the in the world
and it's because it's the very first uh greek monument about 600 bc that is uh that breaks out of the egyptian model egyptian models were left foot forward right foot back like in a block of stone this one it's like they've opened it up it's a real person about to walk out in the naples area as a volcano mount aetna erupted in 79-80 covering everything and this room was in a villa at the foot of mount aetna and it was covered up for almost a thousand years until it came out and ultimately was bought and
brought here too and it's roman wall paintings frescoes and so you have to imagine someone in the high country living in here that would be probably down there somewhere and they're looking through illusionistic architecture see the corinthian column looking through to a cityscape and then because it's a bedroom grandmother probably does that she has guests come over what does she do she might put out a bowl of fruit for people do you see the bowl of fruit in a translucent just to the right of the window over there what year was that um this is
50 b.c that's a long history of that right and they're birds see the birds sitting in there so it's as if you're sitting here dreaming and you can open your eyes and look out to this to the cityscape to this landscape i think the chinese garden is one of the coolest spots in the met it's always calm in here they've been here before i've never met like a dozen times there are very few people usually when it's really busy in the man you want to just break away this is the this is the spot you
can come to open to the sky and the thing that i find remarkable is this is the only place in the met they actually have um live animals they actually have koi goldfish garden was created by artists from china who came over the van gogh room is one of the most popular i've seen the entire museums packed the reason you come to the museum to see the van gogh uh in person is to see the quality of paint how did van gogh paint and you see there are the clouds the clouds have movement i mean
they really look like they're moving and the wheat field down below looks like it's moving it looks like it's shimmering and then halfway between wheat field and the clouds there's a rolling hills those rolling hills exist i always thought the man was crazy and those who were just a figment of his imagination but i rented a house right near the in this town of san mi and those rolling hills they looked just like that but when you're standing in front of it you can see the paint literally rising off the surface enlightened in the room
rebounds off of it and make gives it this remarkable quality so this is really similar to one that most everybody knows at the museum of modern art starry night this one's bigger starry night smaller but it's the same town same view same wheat field same hills labo all right another hidden gem of the met which we couldn't go to today is the rooftop if you want to get a great view of central park that is the spot to do it they also have a bar up there on some weekends they have djs there as well
as you can see right now the line to go up to party on the met rooftop is long i'll be surprised if what we're going to look at now there's anybody looking at it and that's because this is the single in my opinion most important work of italian renaissance in the united states and it's a room called the studiolo ducal palace in somebody's home you have a series of rooms and the innermost room the inner sanctum where the duke and the duke alone is allowed in where all the important papers are it's his study basically
and it's done with the most intricate wood inlay illusionistically he has things from his army days but he also has the parts of music now this is all illusionism there's nothing real in here when you look like a door that's opened or a window that's open that's an illusion it's what we call trump lloyd fool the eye and this is the best example in the united states of this kind of trump load and it's all done in wood different kinds of wood so this is actually my personal favorite exhibit at the met perseus with the
head of medusa simply because i'm a big fan of greek mythology i always love this story so every time i come to the met and i pass this i gotta do a second take the reason i like this so much is it is probably if i had to put my finger on it where modern art starts pablo picasso i mean he's one of the great thinkers in art and this is his patron gertrude stein an american who lived in paris and why is it the origin of modern art well look at the sofa behind her
it starts over here but it disappears on the left hand side if you see her eye one eye looks one way the other eye looks the other way it almost looks like a mask her ear disappears her nose almost looks like a mask that's been flattened a little bit her hands don't they don't really look right decides to break away from the western tradition and this is the beginning of that this picture alone is going to set the stage for cubism futurism and all the other isms that come after it seth for a first timer
coming to the med any big tips for them like how long should they come okay so i don't overdo it coming to the met or any museum should be fun you should pick a handful of objects that are of interest to you look ahead of time use the video to pick some things go and see it but don't burn out this is good new york city advice too then we show them we're comfortable shoes i feel like we've walked 20 city blocks in here this is a humongous museum you can easily tire yourself out 5.4
miles we did 11 200 steps we walked five miles in here there are only 34 vermeer in the world of those 34 there are a quarter of them are in new york between the met and the frick which is just a few blocks away and five are here in the metropolitan museum of art we have one quarter of all the vermeers in the world here and you might know vermeer because of the girl with the plural earring which is the either the movie or the book he's a marvel and though it's not any one work
it's all of them together and that's what makes coming to the met so special nowhere else in the world will you see this many of johannes vermeer if you only have one day central park is right next to the met you could pair these two together easily we have one of the best guides on youtube of what to do in central park check this out if you want to visit after the med
