Museum Mania
Museum Mania
The SF MOMA and the Exploratorium were another two stops on my sister's visit to the Bay Area and this weekend a couple of us ventured out to the de Young Museum. While we were there I started rattling off museums I went to and was called a geek for it. Score!
- Dallas Museum of Art - Dallas - January 2004
- The Louvre - Paris, France - August 2004
- Windsor Castle - Berkshire, England - August 2004
- Madame Tussauds Wax Museum - London, England - August 2004
- Petroleum Museum, Midland - August 2004
- Museum of Natural History - New York City - August 2005
- Getty Museum - Los Angles - October 2005
- National Civil Rights Museum - Memphis - November 2005
- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - San Francisco - March 2006
- Exploratorium - San Francisco - March 2006
- de Young Museum - San Francisco - March 2006
The rest of this post will be about what I thought of the ones I went to the past couple of weekends.
- SF MOMA - my first experience with modern art and pretty encouraging. Before I went, I would look at modern art and say, "huh?" Now I may still say that but to some lesser degree. The audio tour (which I love) explained some of the artists' thoughts on the pieces and I did kind of like how since there's isn't often a formal style to critique, the viewer can concentrate on what s/he feels when viewing the piece. And although, there's no way I'd ever buy modern art, I would fancy the chance to try out something simple. I liked the simplicity of two pieces, specifically. One was a simple gray canvas with an empty picture frame, of the same color, attached on it. For some reason I really like the simple shadow play. The second piece as a giant square canvas where the top two thirds was painted a dark blue, and the bottom third was orange. The piece was supposed to be meditative. As in, it was big enough to fill your entire field of vision and its simplicity would help you concentrate.
- Exploratorium - This is science brought to life. An endless supply of interactive exhibits that teach the principles of science that is simply amazing. The exhibit that temporarily blinds you was a little questionable, but the rest of them were genious!
- de Young Museum - A collection of crafts from the around the world that was recently re-opened after a multi-year rennovation. We saw precisely formed geometric designs cast in glass, pieces decorating human skulls, and a carved tusk of a wooly mammoth. The most striking piece is the hardest to describe. Imagine a colored glass mask. Extending behind this mask is a two-sided pyramid of clear glass. In this pyramid one can see another mask, but because of the way the light reflects off the two sides of the glass, at certain angles one can see both sides of the mask at the same time. Quite the effect :-)
Alrighty, enough geeking for now.