serendipityoucity

My relationship with them is conflicted.  I love what they do but recognize that often once objects make their way to a museum the culture from which those objects are derived is dead.  This is particularly so when looking at aboriginal artifacts.  Alternatively, the curators chose objects that represent the past and the contemporary, objects that embody where we have come from and to some extent where we are in the material world. 

They are object archives, and I love archives. 

I visited the National Gallery of Canada over the holidays. People who know me understand that I have a fascination with body hair, particularly of the female type and wonder how it managed to disapear from the female body - literally - over the years, to the point where a massive industry in myriad forms has marketed us the hairless woman aesthetic.  Hairless below the neck anyway!  During my visit I noticed that 15th century portraits onwards and even ancient sculptures of women that had armpits showing - are devoid of hair!  Did the painters do so on purpose?  Was there an armpit hair removal assistant who would have had special razors or methods to remove hair in those days? Or was it too hard to paint?  Did that create an aesthetic? To be like the paintings? 

I  do not recall seeing any exposed vaginas in the gallery and therefore cannot speak of that hair.  Also, i failed to notice if the nude or semi nude male portraits or sculptures included any chest hair!  I recollect some of the Greek like sculptures and they seem devoid of hair as did Epstein vorticist sculpture and the my favorite Fernand Leger Mechanic. The few male nudes seemed to have a bit of shading around the penis area to suggest hair though!

I want to frequent these public spaces more often.  The free ones anyway.  And bring my studies there, just to be in them and to experience a different sense of space.  A couple of days ago, i walked through the lobby of the Chateau Laurier with Geraldine.  I do so often as a short cut as I love the grandeur of the lobby and to take a peak at the Yousef Karsh portraits from time to time.  There is a wonderfully decorated area with red velvet covered chairs near the Churchill Bull Dog photo, with little round tables and on that day this magnificiently dressed lady with red liptick in her 80s was reading the Globe and was kind enough to tell us about Stephen Leacock who happened to be a professor at McGill (between 1901 to 1944) when she went there!  Unfortunately i know very little about him but do look forward to occupying one of those seats to read a book.

To finish off, here are a few quotes that i really liked from an article about Philippe de Montebello in The Legacy of a Pragmatic Custodian of Human Civilization that triggered my recall about museums this morning.  Montebello was the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he retired after 30 years of service.

“Either you become more autocratic or you relax"

“I’m much less imperious now. I know pretty much what I’m doing.” and “That’s the virtue of longevity,”

he preached ardently the values of art in what he once called “an increasingly prosaic and materialistic world.”

He defended the necessity of the Met and of the few places in the Western world like it — “universal” museums was the disputatious term he liked — to act as havens for civil exchange, for the safe preservation of prized objects from around the globe, and in general for the sane study of humanity at a time of money madness and a dangerous balkanization of politics and culture.

Hagiographic Press Statement 

…attendance is a dispiriting measure of success. Any old Monet show will inflate the numbers without necessarily adding to the sum total of human understanding.

“One should be practical and not too pious,” he told a conference of art historians some years ago. Commercialism pays the bills, he said, and museums are not churches. But “it is the mystery, the wonder, the presence of the real that is our singular distinction and that we should proudly, joyfully proclaim.” But he’s right. Museums dispense aesthetic pleasure, which doesn’t necessarily make people better citizens but at least gives people access to a larger civilization.

Mr. de Montebello made service to the museum socially desirable when almost everywhere else collectors and hedge fund managers seem to treat museums as their servants and publicity agents.