I went to the Louvre yesterday intending to stay a long time, but not necessarily all day. However, once I was there, I found that I just couldn't bear to leave! So I didn't. I wandered around from 10 in the morning until after 9 in the evening (it is open until 10 on Friday nights). It was exhausting--and really, a lot of exercise, when you consider how much walking was involved.
While there, I saw so much that was beautiful, poignant, famous, obscure, ancient, morbid, fantastic, and/or intriguing. It was really too long to be there to process everything that I saw, read, and heard--but that was fine! Even at the end of the evening, when I was too tired to read the label copy, I just enjoyed walking around, seeing and the objects and feeling the atmosphere. I definitely look forward to going back--which I would have to do, even if I weren't already dying to do so. I didn't do quite enough homework, and went on the only day of the week on which the exhibition of African art is closed!
In addition to pondering the various works of art that I was seeing, I thought a lot about Carol Duncan and her book, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. For those of you in more pragmatic lines of work: Duncan argues that public art museums were invented to train the public, to intimidate them into acquiescing to the power of the nation-state. The Louvre is a special example, because it was opened to the public during the French Revolution as one symbolic way of spreading the wealth of the aristocracy to the general citizenry and is really the quintessential public art museum. This is just a sketch, of course, and if you're more interested, do read the book.
Anyway, back to Duncan, the Louvre, and me. Basically, Duncan's right. I am dutifully and properly awed by the capacity of the French state to have acquired and to currently maintain this collection in such an impossibly grand building.
But I also couldn't help but thinking how uncivilized so much of the behavior associated with the Louvre seems. For instance, there is the Da Vinci Code audio tour.
There are also the crowds around the certain few works that everyone must see if they go to the Louvre. People really are appalling as they try to shove closer to the Mona Lisa or the amazing crown of Louis XV, which, as some American teen-agers to my left remarked, is so ornate and the jewels so bright and massive that it does not look like it could possibly be real. Fortunately, no photography is allowed in either of these galleries, although judging from the world-weary but diligent behavior of the museum guards, this rule must be policed at all times.
For some reason, photography of the Venus de Milo is allowed, and it was here that it occurred to me that uncouth behavior is an inherent part of most contemporary visits to the Louvre. Needless to say, I'm very excited to have seen the Venus de Milo, too, but I found myself as interested in the behavior of the crowds.
So, what exactly does it mean to have your picture taken with the Venus de Milo? And what is the Louvre withholding by not allowing you to have your picture taken with La Joconde ?
Clearly, in many ways, these pieces of art can be understood as part of the general list of tourist sights with which one should have one's picture taken if you go. See a blog post from earlier this week for a picture of me with the Eiffel Tower! In some ways, the Mona Lisa is the Eiffel Tower is the Arc de Triomphe is Big Ben is the Sphinx is the Great Wall of China. Yet, there is something fundamentally different about the trek through the Louvre to see just a few works of art in very crowded galleries, and then moving on about one's itinerary elsewhere in the city. How does that time in the jostling crowd in front of a famous work of art change someone? Does shoving one's way to the front to pose for that photograph really make you more cultured?
That new museum for anti-evolutionists in Kentucky also occurred to me a couple of times yesterday, while I was thinking about Duncan. From the images of it that I've seen online, the curators place great emphasis on violence in their version of "history." But what rituals is one performing by going there, I wondered? And what is the cafe like? Are there any dinosaur-themed meals? I bet that there aren't any vegetarian options.
But back to the Louvre! Rembrandt, Rubens, Ingres, Delacroix, Vermeer, da Vinci, and more: It really does make such a difference in the experience of a work of art to see it in person. The textures, the shadows, the size: a piece in its original form is so much more coherent than any flat representation could ever be. I have much food for thought for my work, especially from certain images of women, including those from the Orientalists, but here are a few less work-related (and some more obscure) treats from my day yesterday:
First, another way that the Louvre seemed distinctly "uncivilized" to me was the preponderance of all kinds of tombs, caskets, and other death-related objects. It always just seems disrespectful to me to pull such things out of context. Below, you can see a European tomb and an Egyptian casket:
I guess the following is a little work-related because it is adornment, but I'm sharing it with you just because when I learn silversmithing, I'm going to use it as an inspiration for something in silver and lapis lazuli! This is a Greek bracelet that may be from 200-100 B.C.E., made out of gold and amber. One amber piece represents a human head and the other a lion.
The tapestries from the Renaissance greatly lessened my dread for T.A.-ing a class on Renaissance and Baroque art this fall. It was difficult for me, with my lack of photography skills, to photograph in those rooms because of the special lighting. I did manage to get this image of a tapestry for Norma Kay. This is actually a much later tapestry, from the nineteenth century, and is related to other Orientalist trends.
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For everyone's information, I've finally figured out how to use Skype, so it would be easy to chat with me on the phone! I even have a U.S. number through which I can receive phone calls on my computer. You can email me for the number or to ask me to call you!
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