[travel] Too much fun and too little internet

My access to the intertubes has been limited for a while... the side effect of this is that entries have been piling up unposted. Instead of releasing them all at once (which would clog the ocular interface from your computer screen to your brain, I'm going to trickle them in using LJ's time-setting feature (you have to select “date out of order” and pick a time in the future). You could also use this to post time capsule blog entries to yourself. “Dear Future Matt: An open letter... “ You just have to bet that LJ stays in business for a while.

If anyone has any reason for me not to use the timed-release thing, let me know.

[travel] Museum of a museum

When my friends from home visited in Turkey, we had a whole long conversation about how cool it would be for future archaeologists to uncover a 20th-century museum, and place blurbs on the old blurs explaining 20th century museum customs.

In Warsaw the Communists had turned the main cathedral into a Museum of Atheism. When the Russians were kicked out in 1989, the church unsurprisingly got the cathedral back. I'm a bit sad though... I wish I could have seen what a Russian museum of atheism looked like.

Well, I did finally get to see a museum of a museum in the Swiss National Museum in Zurich. Back in the 1930s, one section of the building had been set up a a museum of some family that lived in some castle. This exhibit was closed for several decades but not taken down. Eventually, enough time had passed that the way the objects were exhibited became interesting, so they reopened it unchanged as a museum of 1930s era museum practices.

The exhibits were crammed close together like a grandmother's living room and very light on description... in fact, almost evety exhibit simply had a number on the cabinet. People at the time either had pamphlets or were shown around by a curator. I imagine it was something akin to wandering through the personal collection of an old professor, with the professor stopping every few seconds to say things like “now this is a most extraordinary find... the Hussite peoples in the 12th century were ...”

There's something a lot more interesting and closer to home for most of you. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles looks and acts like a museum but it's actually an art piece exploring the nature of the museum experience, the act of imbibing information, and the relationship between the viewer and the viewed. The subect matter of the exhibits is interesting, only partially true, and somewhat irrelevant to the point of the experience.

Sex and religion in allegory

This painting (from the main art museum in Warsaw) more or less sums up how I feel about religions that attempt to control human sexuality.



Facial expressions are a lot clearer and more seductive in the full size version.

Here we have an old sinner about to die, and Death brings with an allegorical personified vision of each of the Seven Deadly Sins he committed. (Quick, match them up!) Presumably this was commissioned by the church to scare sinners into repentance or confession. In reality it inspires all kinds of sinful thoughts in at least half its viewers. The artist probably was a patron of certain sins; usually these sorts of artists are the ones with the vivacity and passion to paint that sort of subject well. So we have an institution that wants to control natural human impulses commissioning a passionate indulger of natural human impulses to paint an image of the evils of these natural human impulses. The result is pure Reefer Madness, a work that espouses the virtues of what it's supposed to condemn.