Matisse and others at the Met

I finally got around to seeing the Matisse show at the Met, gathering my courage to deal with the crowds.  It is indeed a fascinating show, one that you look at in a very different way.   Because the subject is multiple versions of the same scene or subject, you look at a set of paintings, usually two or three, rather than at just one painting.  Or, at least, you are looking at a painting with the awareness of the different version of the subject which is next to you.   In the early paintings, for example, you see a still life, painted in either a Signac version or a Cezanne version.  But later, it becomes more interesting, as you see Matisse refining his ideas, so that he does one painting, and then does another one on the same subject; the process usually involves removing details.   Here is one of successive versions of the view from his studio towards Notre Dame:

(The one in the middle is in fact the latest one.)

Is this like a musical theme and variations?   I don't know.  But it is an interesting concept;  why should anyone make a definitive version of a scene.  Why not make multiple versions (assuming the artist can afford the canvas and paint; if they couldn't, they would be more likely to paint over the earlier version.)

I liked these two versions of a Cezanne-like still life:

        I also saw a video, which is the kind of thing that you don't normally see at the Met.  It is a work called "Street", by James Nares.  It is a video taken from a camera mounted on a vehicle cruising through the streets of New York, focusing on people walking on sidewalks.  It was shot with a very special high-speed camera, which allowed Nares to slow the footage down to very slow speed without any of the normal problems with blurring in slow motion.   (You can rent this camera for $3,000 a day.)  It is accompanied by some guitar strumming by Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth), which increases the hypnotic effect, but doesn't do much and becomes tiresome after a while.
What struck me on watching this was this it was a kind of art version of Google's street view still cameras.  But on Google, of course, all the faces are blurred, out of concerns for privacy.   But not here.   I wondered how the people videoed,whose images are now appearing live at the Met, feel about being photographed.  I did some research on this, and it is considered legal to photograph and display images of people without their permission if they appear in a public space.  The exception would be if the images are used for "commercial" purposes, commercial purposes being the implied endorsement of something.  Interesting...