:: Life Of Dave ::

Day at the museums

It was free museum day today, so in theory we were going to get up early and hit several. But we had friends over last night, and it ran very late, so instead we meandered in around noon. We still managed to visit the Picasso museum and the Georges Pompidou. I had read an article last year that said the Picasso was a mess, but I didn't know what that meant. Now I do. We literally went from the first room to the second, and turned back around, assuming we had gone the wrong way - the jump was so sudden and so completely unrelated that we simply couldn't believe we were supposed to move from the one to the other. It continued this way - there were occasional rooms that were well done, but with no explanatory text we had to figure out on our own how things related. So if it wasn't obvious, we just moved on. It was, frankly, awful. And, as the article noted, the new space is no longer intimate, so what used to be a pleasant museum now just feels overdone - I imagine, in part, the fact that we had no idea what was going on, and the new space is quite large, so we spent quite a lot of time having no idea what was going on made it all seem worse. Overall it was a stunning example in how badly you can screw up what should be a lot of interesting artwork.

Thankfully the Pompidou was much nicer. And to compensate for our troubles as we left the sun came out and we had a lovely walk through Paris. Given that it has rained the past few days that was nice indeed.