On my recent trip to the East Coast, I gorged myself on museums and monuments more than usual. I had once thought that the USA was a poor cousin to Europe in the self-glorification stakes, but I think that no longer:

This time to New York, I avoided the usual suspects in the line-up of large-scale museums hoping to find small boutique museums but I still managed to stumble onto a magnificent museum that I had never heard of, the PS1 Museum of Modern Art. After visiting a former flatmate’s silk-screening studio in Queens, I found myself in Long Island City with nothing to do but visit the PS1. First off, it’s cheap – I paid all of $2 (as a student) to get in. This museum breaks the mould of the typical museum architecture of modernist temple. Instead, the PS1 is housed in a rejuvenated red brick school building, with the regimented interior of a prison facility typical of schools. One of the consequence of using former class-rooms is that the rooms were smaller than the usual gargantuan halls and consequently, the PS1 had the rare luxury of displaying a single work in many rooms. In the basement, waters pipes were exposed and video installations were placed in the dark recesses of the basement. But the building would be naught if the works were not outstanding. When I was there, the collection was Arctic Hysteria, a collection of Finnish, including many wonderful video installations (“Complaints Choir” was my favorite – funny, accessible, and filled with human feeling – something most modern art fails to be), and a mind-bending Olifar Eliason installation, titled appropriately, “Take your time”.

Still, I couldn’t help myself as I visited The Metropolitan Museum in New York once again. By now, one should now that one doesn’t actually have to pay to get in. This time, I breezed through an awful “superheroes” fashion show, floated up to the roof to see some Jeff Koons spectacularly awful kitsch pieces. Is it art? It sure is. Is it accessible? Well, as my friend said, if you don’t get it, you must be a retard. What is left is a mindless transcendence drained of mystery. Thanks Jeff. Then I washed that nasty taste out of my mouth by melting into the gorgeous Rembrandt portraits downstairs.

Running away from the rain one afternoon in Manhattan, I found shelter in the new building of the New Museum in the Bowery. At first I liked the building, a bold modernist symbol, but on reflection and after a sharp reprimand from my architect friend Kimberley, I realize that it’s a terribly inappropriate building, like a robotic phallic symbol, the jagged modernist lines rapes the red-brick squalor of the Lower East Side. Inside, the space is classically modernist, large boxy spaces that overwhelm the art inside. However there was a great staircase, and a “performance artist”, a fleshy well-built politely-dressed black man who spent the day slowly writhing in the corner. It was a kind of horizontal dance again as the man mashed his forehead into the corner. Was it political? Was it revolutionary? Whatever it was, it was damned amusing – what a way to earn a living.

Fortunately, my hostel in Boston was located only a ten minute walk from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. For such a self-consciously intellectual city, this is the kind of museum Boston needs to have – a kind of Cliff-notes for pan-European art. It’s a finely curated collection, providing a comprehensive panorama of any typical fine arts museum, I was particularly impressed with their Asian collection. I was much taken with a dramatic display of several wooden statues lifted from a Japanese temple. Spotlights cast ghostly shadows off the frightening shapes of Japanese deities. It was here that I learnt about one of the most fascinating painters that ever lived, the brilliant Zhang Daqian, known as the greatest painter of his generation, and also the most successful forger, who successfully sold fake ancient paintings to every major museum in the United States. I need his skills for my science.

Tucked away in the cloister walls of Harvard is the Harvard Museum of Natural History. This is truly a museum trapped in time as the exhibits are tucked away in a maze of narrow corridors and glass cases filled with crumbling carcasses, cracked skins and dusty bones. I was particularly taken by the bone section, where the skeletons of several mammals were displayed right next to their taxidermied counterpart, allowing you to see how the flesh fits on to denuded skeletons.

Perhaps the most gorgeous building in the United States is the Jefferson Library (Library of Congress) in Washington DC, which houses the original 6000 volumes of the private Jefferson collection that was donated to the government of the United States to start its national library after their initial collection burnt down. The building is copied from a Renaissance style, filled with marble cherubs and columns as the Americans had not yet developed their own style of architecture. the Americans wanted a building fit for a royal reception. I rather enjoyed the homely american maxims that adorned the walls instead of pretentious obscure latin proverbs. The private collection of Jefferson allows glimpse into the intellectual makeup of this founding father. He is definitely better read than your average founding father.

What use is it having an empire if you can’t collect booty? And so the National Gallery of Art is the showcase of the might of the American empire. The sheer quality of this collection shows that Americans can match it with the big boys, the American aesthete has grown up and joined the rest of the grown-ups at the table. The collection is, in a word, spectacular. Numerous Rembrandts and Monets, and even a da Vinci – in fact, the only da Vinci on the North American continent. There’s also some good home-grown stuff too – John Sargeant Singer and Mary Cassaut. But skip right post the colonial stuff.

As the Romans deified the Cesars, so the Americans deify Lincoln. Here is a monument done in the classical Greek style, a man chiseled into the mass of many times greater than the average man. The background is austere, and the walls are adorned by the words of the Gettysburg address.

From the triumphal march of the memorials of American victory, you arrive at the heart-breaking Vietnam Memorial. Words on reflective black marble, the blast of names forces you to reflect on the fact that these were real men, alive and fitful, now dead and buried. The citations of names is a reminder of wall and legend, drawing a line straight back to the Iliad.

The Korean War Memorial is surprising for its drama. Here is a out-sized American patrol, caught in silvery stone. “Freedom is not free,” proclaims this memorial.

The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History is the best natural history museum that I’ve ever seen, and I say this as a professional scientist. It’s a large collection but selectively displayed. It’s never daunting. The exhibits of animals and rocks and fossils are given room to breathe in a clean playful modern style, and this is all housed in a grand old building. Some of the exhibits were so well done they could have easily been exhibited in the Met. The information is pitched at a smart level and avoids those stupid “how many dinosaurs do you see” placards that ruin many other natural history museum in the name of fun. I found that the layout of the exhibits carefully spelt out important concepts behind paleontology in a logical and self-explanatory way. Case in point, the importance of the development of eggs and seeds in the evolution of land animals and land plants was made abundantly clear, a point I’d never realized before.

It there is a holy temple that houses the sacred artifacts of the United States of America then the National Archives is it. Herein lies some of the greatest written documents that humankind has produced – right up there with the Laws of Hammuurabi, and the Mosaic Ten Commandments. These muscular pieces of political rhetoric ushered in a completely new form of government that has withstood 400 years of political tides and it is right that every American citizen should pay homage to these documents.

If you believe that great art by necessity fuses art with politics, then the National Portrait Galley is it. It is the perogative of every American president to have their portrait painted by an artist of their choice. These American artists of the past have tried to capture the essence of their most powerful man. The choice of artist is as interesting as the way the portraits were rendered. Norman Rockwell for Nixon. The explosion of American art during the 60’s is echoed in the spectacular portrait of JFK. But by Reagan, we’re back into the conservative semi-realist style that eschews the drama of the chiaroscuro of the great Dutch masters. The most haunting is perhaps the photo taken of Lincoln 2 months before the assassination where a huge crack in the glass obscures the man. Beside every portrait is a description of each presidency, and these short paragraphs provides a succinct summary of the history of the United States, pictures of the men who made catastrophic mistakes, and pictures of those who fixed them.

I love fish. Not just to eat it, but to see it. And that is why I love the Baltimore Aquarium. It really is a great aquarium. I was surprised at first, instead of huge vainglorius tanks of fish, a large part of the aquarium is devoted to recreating micro-enviroments of the sea, from sandy coasts, to marshy tangles, to rocky coves. In each micro-exhibit, you can see the kind of fish and other sea-creatures that hide under the reflective sheen of the water. And it is just breath-taking. When sea creatures move, they move in 3 dimensions. But fish move in much more graceful arcs than birds in the sky. Slow turtles became graceful swimmers underwater. Their movements are so strange and hypnotic. The showcases of the Baltimore Aquarium is their indoor dolphin tank, a huge recreation of a an Atlantic coastal reef, and a steamy Amazonion jungle, complete with sloths in the tree-tops.