Paris, France
I'm still in Paris. After my last update I checked out the Modern Art Musuem (le centre pompadou) and had a good time strolling the installations. Russell has a wonderfully elegant theory that once cameras assumed the role of painting (still life, portraits) that painters were freed from the obligation of creating representational art. I agree and if you compare classical to modern art it's really night and day with no transition save for the Impressionists.
There's pretty much a formula to most modern art installations which goes that something either has to be:
1) Excessively Large (e.g. a giant glove)
2) Made of a strange material ( e.g. a Plane made of straw or felt piano)
3) Several similar objects in the same place (e.g. gas masks in a glass box)
Bonus points are given for beaing really freaky. Still I love it because of the kind of thought it provokes-- even if you completely disagree with the artists pompous suppostitions about ontology and culture. There was a really cool puppet show about the new art building at Harvard and it's impact on humanity. Okay so there were just lots of wierd puppets... I'm easy to please.
We had some dinner at a local cafe-- les deux magots (Magi not maggots) which was pretty good. Paris is a pretty safe city to wander in anywhere and order the du jour. Obviously you want to avoid the touristy spots as always-- those are a trap.
This morning we went to the catacombs. It was like playing dungeons in dragons in real life, except I didn't have any weapons and the only monsters were small children. But nonetheless it was a creepy underground adventure. For those who don't know here's the highlights: after the French revolution they had to move the bones of 6 million parisians out of the cemeteries so they decided -- God knows why-- to decorate the underground quarries with artistic arrangements of their skulls and femurs.
It's basically that-- a huge ossuary of twisting corridors where the walls are nothing but skulls and bones. Sadly flash photography is forbidden and there were no good places to get me giving the thumbs up or finger guns to the camera with 200 year old skulls in the background.
I recently came to an epiphany about being American. Part of the fun of being an american tourist is that no one really expects you to follow the rules of a foreign culture. I honestly think English tourists are the worst in terms of being loud and disruptive (Especially during world cup) but Americans get stuck with this sort of awkward guilt about our presence in other countries. No one hates an Amreican tourist more than an American tourist etc. Still it's kind of fun to think that if you find a local custom bothersome or inconvenient you can just ignore it. You're American and people probably expected it anyway.
There's pretty much a formula to most modern art installations which goes that something either has to be:
1) Excessively Large (e.g. a giant glove)
2) Made of a strange material ( e.g. a Plane made of straw or felt piano)
3) Several similar objects in the same place (e.g. gas masks in a glass box)
Bonus points are given for beaing really freaky. Still I love it because of the kind of thought it provokes-- even if you completely disagree with the artists pompous suppostitions about ontology and culture. There was a really cool puppet show about the new art building at Harvard and it's impact on humanity. Okay so there were just lots of wierd puppets... I'm easy to please.
We had some dinner at a local cafe-- les deux magots (Magi not maggots) which was pretty good. Paris is a pretty safe city to wander in anywhere and order the du jour. Obviously you want to avoid the touristy spots as always-- those are a trap.
This morning we went to the catacombs. It was like playing dungeons in dragons in real life, except I didn't have any weapons and the only monsters were small children. But nonetheless it was a creepy underground adventure. For those who don't know here's the highlights: after the French revolution they had to move the bones of 6 million parisians out of the cemeteries so they decided -- God knows why-- to decorate the underground quarries with artistic arrangements of their skulls and femurs.
It's basically that-- a huge ossuary of twisting corridors where the walls are nothing but skulls and bones. Sadly flash photography is forbidden and there were no good places to get me giving the thumbs up or finger guns to the camera with 200 year old skulls in the background.
I recently came to an epiphany about being American. Part of the fun of being an american tourist is that no one really expects you to follow the rules of a foreign culture. I honestly think English tourists are the worst in terms of being loud and disruptive (Especially during world cup) but Americans get stuck with this sort of awkward guilt about our presence in other countries. No one hates an Amreican tourist more than an American tourist etc. Still it's kind of fun to think that if you find a local custom bothersome or inconvenient you can just ignore it. You're American and people probably expected it anyway.