Museum Crawl, part 1

I don't have class from noon Tuesday until noon Thursday, which means that I spend the middle part of every week (and sometimes the weekends, too) exploring markets and museums. (If anyone ever needs to find me, there are three places I could be: a park, a market, or a museum.) Here is a first list of museums.

Museum of London A very large museum currently undergoing renovations to make it larger. They attempt to describe the history of the London area since the very first inhabitants until the Great Fire of 1666. This means that along with the normal exhibits of Roman mosaics, Saxon jewelry, and Tudor regalia, they also have the largest collection I have ever seen of swords, all recovered from the Thames. They play music appropriate to the exhibit in each room, which means that standing between rooms can be slightly confusing. Outside the museum is the last remaining section of the London Wall, originally built by the Romans in mid first century to protect the city after Boudicca burned it to the ground. It was rebuilt many times over the next millenium, but now is hardly more than a pile of stones. A very old, very lovely, pile of stones.

Sir John Soane's Museum A very cluttered museum. Sir John Soane was an architect and collector who built his house as a museum for his artifacts. It's a lovely house, full of nooks and crannies, with secret doors that open to reveal paintings, stairwells into church crypts, and skylights in every room. His artifacts are all unlabeled and more or less randomly thrown together. They range from paintings by famous British artists to pieces of sea coral to a bust of Shakespeare to bits of statuary (such as elbows or feet) and chunks of marble facade. There is even an Egyptian sarcophagus for which Soane personally outbid the British Museum. The house is kept exactly as it was when Soane lived in it - which makes me wonder, where did he sleep? In the sarcophagus? Leaning his head against a marble shoulder?

Tate Modern One of the highlights of London, they say. It was certainly informative - it taught me that I don't particularly like modern (and especially contemporary) art. Let me give you a few examples of "art": Silver objects, flattened by a steam roller, organized into thirty circles and hung from the ceiling so that they float three inches above the floor. Several hundred used bars of soap strung onto a cord. A large piece of latex covered in red sawdust and stretched out from the gallery wall. A video of a woman pouring blood over her naked body and rolling around in feathers and down. Canvases sprayed with blood and cut with nails. A huge table and chairs tall enough to walk under. An animation of a woman reading a book out loud. A collection of Soviet propaganda posters. Two pieces of scrap metal precariously balanced in a corner. An uprooted palm tree lying on the floor, surrounded by collages involving miniature lace dresses, palm fronds, and dirt. A replica of an artist's messy studio, with all items (paint cans, a tire, a milk carton, cassettes, brushes, a rubber duck, etc.), all meticulously carved out of polyurethane and painted to look like the original. Many of these were very profound if you were to read the commentaries. But shouldn't art be recognizable as such without a ten-sentence (or more) explanation?