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[bec_87rb]

Yesterday at lunch, we hustled down the Hill just before noon to the National Gallery of Art, where we met SH's friend in the rotunda area. The friend, whom we shall call KJ, is a docent trying out one of her future tours on us, cultural learning guinea pigs. Wheek, wheek

Comments

[suegypt]

Just as appreciation, the Rembrandt makes me feel something, like there's someone behind those shaded eyes, an intelligence, someone who may have lived and may have suffered. Ol' Pinky just looks like a party boy, which doesn't interest me as it does you, if only because I hate parties.

But, yeah, I envy you living in the area for just this reason you mention. You can go look right at art work so awesome that it makes you feel something about someone who has not existed for hundreds of years.

[bec_87rb]

The Rembrandt gentleman looks in person as if he is about to speak, as if he is taking off his gloves and about to say something witty.

[ellisbell]

This sounds really cool. It's been so long since I've been to a museum. I really like them a lot.
I used to go to the Art Institute every Tuesday in Chicago when I was waiting tables. Tuesdays were free.

[bec_87rb]

Even better than a convenient museum is a convenient free museum! Art Institute is modern art?

[ellisbell]

Oh it's everything, from what I remember. Not just modern art. (In fact, did it HAVE modern art? It's been so long.) My favorite thing was a hall that held weaponry from all the ages of man. I found it fascinating to look at actual instruments of death. People actually killed each other with this thing, I'd think. I know that sounds incredibly morbid, and one thing I am NOT is morbid, so I am baffled as to why this was my favorite.
Also, people were way smaller back then. There is an ornamental war costume from one of the Ming dynasties on display and it is TINY.

btw, I lived in Alexandria and worked in DC for one summer many years ago - sadly, I NEVER went to see anything, except the Lincoln Monument and the Washington Monument (and those only because I was on the mall for Fourth of July). For some reason it's hard to get out to places when you live there. Do you feel that way? My theory is that on the weekends I was too busy relaxing from the workweek to want to leave the house.

[bec_87rb]

There is a definite problem where riding in on the Metro feels like going to work, so it makes you think, eeeehhh, I don't wanna go into town. When people come to visit, that helps you to get new eyes about it, but sitting at home is easier. That's why telework is so perncious - you start to associate work with home.

[chhinnamasta]

On the subject of "artwork so awesome it makes you feel something about someone who has not existed for hundreds of years," (well, in this case tens of thousands of years) a few days ago we watched Werner Hertzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which provides a peek into Chauvet Cave, the site of a paleolithic gallery radiocarbon dated at over 30K years. What were those humans doing in there all those years ago? I was especially intrigued by the curious fields of dots and handprints that looked, to me, like tallies.

[bec_87rb]

Pretty cool. A tally, as in, everytime I kill a buffalo, I put up a handprint?

Also, there were lions and rhinos in France 30,000 years ago? O.o

[chhinnamasta]

Could be... or a tally of dead hunters, or the number of humans in a group of some sort, or... the mind boggles. Just looked like counting to me. Or, perhaps an early attempt at pointillism? I have absolutely no idea how those humans viewed the world, which is why it's so intriguing to look at their marks and drawings.

Wooly rhinos

[bec_87rb]

They are so much more lovely with fur!

Yes, you can get a rough kind of counting that way, I agree.