Posts Tagged ‘museums’
“What would I put in a museum? Probably a museum!”*…
From our friends at Coudal Partners (c.f. here, here, and here), The Museum of Online Museums…
Here, you will find links from our archives to online collections and exhibits covering a vast array of interests and obsessions: Start with a review of classic art and architecture, and graduate to the study of mundane (and sometimes bizarre) objects elevated to art by their numbers, juxtaposition, or passion of the collector. The MoOM is organized into three sections.
The Museum Campus contains links to brick-and-mortar museums with an interesting online presence. Most of these sites will have multiple exhibits from their collections (or, in the case of the Smithsonian, displays of items not on display in the Washington museum itself).
Aside from the quarterly list of links, we pull out five collections of particular interest and highlight them. New to the MoOM this fall will be the The Benefactors’ Gallery, in which our Board of Directors will post links to their own and other notable collections.
One thing you won’t find at MoOM are collections of posters or maps. As particular interests of ours, posters and maps have their own departments in the coudal.com archives. Find them and be lost for hours. [Your correspondent was…]
*John Hodgman
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As we rethink the idea of “walls,” we might spare a fevered dream or two for Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol; he died on this date in 1989. Best known by the name with which he signed his artwork, Salvador Dali, he was a prominent Surrealist, whose work was distinguished by his fine draughtsmanship and his obsession with symbolism. Cited as an artistic influence by the likes of Damien Hirst, Noel Fielding, and Jeff Koons, it seems likely that Dali’s gifted self-promotion was similarly an inspiration to Warhol.
The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.
– Salvador Dali
Standing watch…
From Minneapolis’ glorious Walker Art Center, Todd Balthazor‘s musings on the life of a museum guard…
Larger versions of these comics, and many more, at the Walker’s MNArtists blog.
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As we wax philosophical, we might recall that it was on this date in 2001 that the British government, making good on an election pledge, dropped all entry fees to 13 of Britain’s most popular government-sponsored museums, including the National History Museum and the Victoria and Albert. Shortly, others– including the Tate Modern and the Imperial War Museum– followed; and over the ensuing decade, attendance rose by over 150%.
The National Gallery
Art that wants to be free…
Alexander the Great in the Air; Unknown; Regensburg, Bavaria, Germany, Europe; about 1400 – 1410 with addition in 1487; Tempera colors, gold, silver paint, and ink on parchment
Early this month, The Getty Museum announced the launch of their Open Content Program, which makes over 4500 images from their collection (including the three examples here) available under an open license– meaning that anyone can share the images freely and without restriction.
Among The Tree Tops Calaveras Grove; Carleton Watkins, American, 1829 – 1916; California, United States, North America; negative about 1878; print 1880 – 1890; Albumen silver print
A Crocodile [as then imagined from reports]; Unknown; England, Europe; about 1250 – 1260; Pen-and-ink drawings tinted with body color and translucent washes on parchment
Visit the Getty’s site to begin exploring. [via Public Domain Review]
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As we share and share alike, we might send acerbic birthday greetings to journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, and critic Henry Louis “H. L.” Mencken; he was born on this date in 1880. Mencken is the author of the philological work The American Language, and is remembered for his journalism (e.g., his coverage of the Scopes Trial) and for his cultural criticism (and editorship of American Mercury– published by Alfred Knopf, also born on this date, but 12 years after Mencken ) in which he championed such writers as D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Sherwood Anderson. But “H.L.” is probably most famous for the profusion of pointed one-liners and adages that leavened his work…
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom. . . [and] the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
1932 portrait by Carl Van Vechten
Pictures at an Exhibition…
From fine arts…
… through antiquities…
… to natural history…
…”grannybeelee” has collected a mesmerizing set of museum (and, as at the top of this post, analogically-related) photos at Hours of Idleness.
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As we gallery-hop with glee, we might recall that it was on this date in 1911 that Hiram Bingham discovered the Lost City of the Incas, Vilcapampa (now called Machu Picchu), where the last Incan Emperors found refuge from the conquistadors.
Machu Picchu had been forgotten by all but a few Peruvians living in close proximity. An academic, explorer, treasure hunter, politician and acknowledged inspiration for the Indiana Jones character, Bingham, leading a Yale expedition, followed one of those locals, Melchor Arteaga, to the site, then published his findings. Machu Picchu has become one of the major tourist attractions in South America– and the switchback-filled road that carries tourist buses to the site from the Urubamba River is called the Hiram Bingham Highway.
(While Bingham is widely-acknowledged as the man who brought Machu Picchu to the modern world’s attention, there are credible claims to its re-discovery that predate his: the Cusco explorers Enrique Palma, Gabino Sanchez and Agustín Lizarraga are said to have arrived at the site in 1901; and descendants of two local missionaries, Thomas Payne and Stuart McNairn, claimed to have climbed the ruins in 1906.)
Bingham (above) and Arteaga, at Machu Picchu
Another Roadside Attraction…
Readers still wrestling with the need to finalize this summer’s vacation plans will be grateful to Atlantic Cities for its survey of “9 Utterly Bizarre Museums.” From the sublime…
The Miniature Book Museum in Baku
… to the, well…
The Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum in Osaka
… with body parts, voodoo, funerals, Parisian sewers, and toilets in the mix.
And then there is the Mutter Museum in Phildelphia…
…a museum “best known” for its skull collection. Other artifacts include a wax model of a woman with a horn growing out of her forehead, several wax molds of untreated conditions of the head, and a nine-foot-long human colon that contained over 40 pounds of fecal matter.
Also not to miss – the body of the Soap Lady, whose corpse turned itself into a “soapy substance called adipocere better known as grave wax.”
And Boston’s Museum of Bad Art…
The museum’s curators seek “art too bad to be ignored.” The first piece was found in the trash.
Once, the museum would not pay more than $6.50 for a piece, now most are donated by the artists themselves. The most famous piece is Lucy in the Field With Flowers, featuring a woman skipping through a field in a blue dress.
Turn summer into an educational adventure with the help of “9 Utterly Bizarre Museums.”
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As we search for a docent, we might recall that this date in 1881 is the earliest of three competing candi-dates for the invention of the ice cream sundae. In the most ancient of the creation tales, a treat-seeking patron of Edward Berner’s drug store in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, sat down at the soda-fountain counter. Since it was the Sabbath, the customer couldn’t have the desirable, but proscribed-by-Blue-Laws, ice cream soda that he wanted. Berner improvised, putting ice cream in a dish and pouring over it the chocolate syrup that was previously only used as flavoring in ice-cream sodas. And so the “ice cream Sunday” was born. It’s popularity grew, and soon it was ordered throughout the week. Finally, when a glass salesman convinced Berner to order special canoe-shaped vessels for the confection, the spelling of Sundae was changed… or so the denizens of Two Rivers aver; the good people of Ithaca, New York, and Evanston, Illinois beg to differ.
The ice cream sundae in its more modern vessel
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