NYC's Metropolitan Museum of Art Has Installed a Surreal Rooftop Dinner Party

Characters and objects from the Met's collection have been digitally scanned, cast as sculptures and spread underneath the Manhattan skyline.
Tom Clift
April 15, 2017

The roof at New York's world famous Metropolitan Museum of Art is playing host to a most unusual dinner party. Created by prolific Argentinean artist Adrián Villar Rojas, The Theater of Disappearance consists of more than 100 characters and objects from the Met's incredible collection that have been digitally scanned and cast as sculptures, before being spread around the Iris and B Gerald Cantor Roof Garden.

Made with 3D printers or through a computer-controlled milling process, the outdoor display mixes and matches artwork from all around the globe. Some figures sit around long white banquet tables, while others look out across the Manhattan skyline. Egypt's King Horemheb gives a piggyback ride to a woman in sneakers, who in turn holds Tutankhamun's head in her left hand. Plates and coins and goblets and even medieval armour lay strewn across the table.

"I wanted to play with the doodles of culture," Rojas told The New York Times. Unhappy with what he sees as the sterile, constructed world of contemporary museums, he decided to imagine his own museum "without divisions, without geopolitics, totally horizontal."

The Theater of Disappearance will be on display at The Met until October 29, weather permitting.

Images via The Met on Twitter.

Published on April 15, 2017 by Tom Clift
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