The New Museum may have a giant slide on the Bowery but the MoMA has free food uptown. Well, free if you've already got a membership to the museum, otherwise it'll cost you $25. Because the curry that they are serving on the museum's second floor? It's art, baby.

The free curry isn't being cooked in the gallery (it is being brought up from one of the museum's kitchens), but it is a central part of Rirkrit Tiravanija's piece "Untitled (Free/Still)," which first went up in 1992 and which the museum acquired this year. In a discussion of the piece the artist describes his thinking back when he made the piece:

I was working on the idea of food, but in a kind of anthropological and archeological way. It was a lot about, the layers of, taste and, otherness. ... The work is a platform for people to interact with the work itself but also with each other. A lot of it also about a kind of experiential relationship, so you actually are not really looking at something, but you are within it, you are part of it. The distance between the artist and the art and the audience gets a bit blurred.

But more important than the why of the food, to us at least, is how it tastes. And according to one Midtown Lunch tipster, it is not bad...but the portions are small. Hey, nobody said a free lunch would be filling!

You can check out "Untitled (Free/Still)" on the second floor of the museum from noon to 3 p.m. through February 8 (except on Fridays when it will be served from 4 to 7 p.m.).