If you've seen my MoMA and Guggenheim posts, you'll know that you can comfortably see their collections in a few hours. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, known as the Met, is a whole different ballgame.
We did a whistle-stop visit of the Met after visiting the
American Museum of Natural History (another quick visit; it's on the other side of Central Park, if you're planning to visit both). The Met in question in this post is the 5th Avenue one, the one that's famous for the annual Met Gala.
If those steps above look familiar that's because it's the place where the Gossip Girl gang sat on the steps at lunchtime and, of course, the museum has featured in lots of other films and TV shows - including Ocean's Eight, The Thomas Crown Affair, Hitch, and When Harry Met Sally (to name just a few).
Tickets cost $25 and it's an additional $7 for an audio guide - we used the
New York Pass, which includes the audio guide for free but, like I mentioned above, we only had time to do a flying visit so we didn't get chance to use the audio guide (or see as much of the Met as we would have liked to).
Whether you buy a ticket or use something like New York Pass, that ticket is valid for three-days, regardless. This is probably a good indication of how much time you need to spend there to see everything, if I'm hazarding a guess. We only spent a woeful 90 minutes there.
(There's also the Met Breuer on Madison Avenue and the Met Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, which hopefully I'll get the chance to visit at some point - your three-day ticket includes entry to these two museums as well.)
Unlike
MoMA and the
Guggenheim, which have mostly art, sculptures and installations, the Met has more depth to it because it has 5,000 years of art housed there. Expect to find Egyptian artefacts, arms and armoury and musical instruments - alongside its modern and contemporary paintings.
I definitely need to come back to explore the Met properly and do it justice! Have you been? x
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