Frank Lloyd Wright would not approve.
At the Museum of Modern Art, where his life's work is on display in a special exhibition, visitors who come to worship at the shrine of architecture have been sneaking off on Friday evenings to the Garden Cafe for free jazz.There, over a drink and perhaps a cheeseburger or slice of lasagna, dozens of reprobates actually seem to be enjoying the vastly inferior art of music. Sacrilege.
Uptown, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Friday and Saturday evenings have become date nights. Up on the Great Hall Balcony, the wine begins to flow at 4 p.m. The string quintet begins at 5. As the shadows thicken, couples stake their claim to small tables with two tiny votive candles. Meaningful glances are exchanged. Club Met?
Two of New York's greatest art museums are shrewdly responding to an uncomfortable fact of modern life: they are competing in the free market for a slice of the consumer's leisure time.
In the past decade, most of the city's art museums woke up to the uncomfortable reality that working people, and especially working couples, do not find traditional museum hours very convenient. The Met, the Modern, the Guggenheim and the Whitney all added on evening hours to attract extra visitors.
The Met and the Modern have gone a step further. Four and half years ago, the Met extended its hours until 8:45 on Friday and Saturday nights. But it then decided that extra hours were not enough.
"We also made a conscious attempt to change the atmosphere in the museum," said Richard Morsches, the museum's vice president for operations. "What we wanted to achieve, when you walk through the front door, was a magical feeling."
Would romantic be the right word? "Romantic, yes," Morsches said. "Romantic, and civilized."
Art and eros have been flirting for a long time in New York, at least since Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska in "The Age of Innocence" strolled through the Met and exchanged decorous, sizzling confidences.
More recently, in "Angie," Stephen Rea makes his play for Geena Davis at the Met. Both the Met and the Modern have shrewdly garnished the basic concept with drinks and music.
So far, the formula seems to be working. For many years, beginning in 1969, the Met stayed open late on Tuesdays, but the attendance figures flattened out at about 2,200 visitors in the evening. On Friday and Saturday, the museum has averaged 4,000 visitors.
The Museum of Modern Art took note. Last September, it extended its hours to 8:30 p.m. on Fridays, with drinks in the Garden Cafe, free jazz and a pay-what-you-will policy starting at 5:30.
The museum now pulls in about 1,600 visitors on Friday evenings, up from 800 when the new policy started and within striking distance of the 2,200 visitors it gets on Thursday evenings, its traditional late-hour day.
Just as important as numbers, at both museums, the evening crowds tend to be younger, a hopeful sign for institutions intent on attracting the next generation of members. At the Met, officials say the extra hours have attracted more black and Hispanic visitors.
The Modern offers a looser, funkier experience. The garden cafe, on the museum's lower level, has the air of a college student union, brimful of the optimistic vibes of a crowd that knows it has stumbled onto a good, and extraordinarily cheap, thing.
The atmosphere is no-frills. The cafe, with its low ceiling and acoustical tile, has all the charm of a bingo hall. But the blue and white wicker chairs are comfortable, the music - advertised on a metal stand-up sign outside the museum's front entrance - is free, and the crowd is lively.
Last Friday, about 80 people filled the main room of the cafe, where the Jazz Mentality, the featured group for April, performed three sets of be-bop-inspired music.
When a museumgoer pushed a tray with an Italian sandwich and a miniature bottle of red wine toward the cash register, the cashier pointed toward a makeshift bar and said: "Why don't you buy your wine there? It's cheaper."
Darn right. The soft drinks go for $1.50; beer, wine and mixed drinks for $3.
Some of the cafe crowd came to rendezvous before heading off to a night on the town. Others gathered for a drink and a set of jazz before watching an 8 o'clock film at the Modern's theater. Others listened intently to the music, including a few bargain-minded hipsters with regulation jazzophile skullcaps. Some people stayed for all three sets.
Aside from a few mumbling eccentrics, the audience was under 30 and peppy, buoyed by the happy thought that another work week had just been deep-sixed.
"At the back of the room, they were there to eat, and the music was more background to them," said Myles Weinstein, the group's drummer. "But the people closer up were into it."
He continued: "It's a different environment than a club, because people are generally there to see the art, so I guess this is a bonus for them. They're seeing modern art, and we're playing modern art."
Besides the free jazz, the Modern offers a Friday-evening series called Conversations With Contemporary Artists, in which artists like Sam Gilliam and Mark Tansey, to take two recent examples, begin by talking about their work, and then lead a small audience into the museum galleries to discuss specific works. At the end of the evening, the artist and participants have a drink, mingle and chat.
"This is part of a larger movement, a change in the last 10 to 20 years from the old vision of the museum as a temple that you went to to be educated," said Richard Oldenburg, the Modern's director. "We want the museum to be a place to enjoy art as a pleasure in life, as well as a way to understand it."
The pleasure principle operates full throttle at the Met, in a more subdued, plush setting. The attractions of marble, seductive shadows and classical music wafting in the air have not passed unnoticed by New Yorkers.
There is something vaguely illicit and mysterious about the Met after dark. Not surprisingly, the small tables on the balcony, with their deep-rose tablecloths, fill up quickly. Last Saturday, about 130 people, all well dressed, occupied every table deployed on three sides of the balcony.
Many were couples, sharing romantic, civilized thoughts. More than a few tables were occupied by women dressed to the nines and heavily into the sport of people watching.
Apparently, news of the balcony scene has not yet reached foreign parts. The language spoken is emphatically, and unusually, English.
On Saturday, a string quintet made up of players from the Orion Music organization began, as always, with waltzes and operetta selections by Strauss, Lehar and Friml. The music was light, but the performers were working hard.
"It's a very energy-demanding job, to create that much sound," said Beryl Diamond, who usually plays first violin with the quintet. "It's like throwing your voice to fill a football stadium."
For that reason, the group usually resists requests for full-length performances of quintets by Dvorak, Brahms and Schumann. Instead, it serves up reductions, or potted versions, of operas, and as the evening proceeds, it moves toward excerpts from Bach, Mozart and Brahms.
"It's amazing how musically educated the audience is," said Ms. Diamond. "We've played some very obscure pieces, and usually someone comes up and says, `Excuse me, but isn't that so-and-so?' "
The quintet has been playing long enough to develop a following. One couple invited the musicians to come up to Vermont for a weekend of skiing.
A sculptor has asked Ms. Diamond to come to Brooklyn to see the influence of her music on his work. One evening, the players got a note on a napkin that read: "I am a poor Japanese student. Thank you so much."
For some of the listeners, music is the food of love. Surely, if you're going to pitch your best line, this is the place to do it.
"One evening a guy came up all flushed and said, `I just proposed to my girlfriend,' " said Ms. Diamond. The group obliged with the Triumphal March from Grieg's "Sigurd Jorsalfar" Suite.
On another occasion, Ms. Diamond was approached by a couple who said they had spent their first date sitting at a table on the Met balcony. Marriage followed.
Ms. Diamond laughed and said, "I guess we put the right amount of schmaltz in our Friml."