A Day of Modern Art and Violence

Washington Monument in a thunderstorm as seen from Capitol Hill

14 June 2015

Jack and I walked home from the Newseum in a thunderstorm.  As I dry out, I shall blog.

Today, during visits to the Smithsonian's Hershhorn Museum of modern art and the Newseum, we learned that the human race is violent, brutal, and generally dispicable.

Things started off innocently enough with a typical dose of modern art that, if the description has to explain what the piece is about, is not worth spending time with.  There were a few pieces worth mentioning.  I'll let you be the judge:

No, not that Nick Cave. This is a different Nick Cave (you should click on the link).

Are there really this many beaded Easter baskets in the flea markets of the world?

I liked this one.  There's a lot of fine detail and optical trickery going on:

Click on the picture and zoom in if you can:

At the entrance to this next sculpture, the security guard grinned and asked, "What's your first thought?"

I chewed my lip.

"That I'm underneath a cow."

The title should say "Mooing," I think.

We then spent a lot of time in an exhibit of photography of Iranian revolution by Shirnin Neshat.  This was our first dose of human violence for the day.

The second came as we went to the Newseum and spent time at exhibits on the Berlin Wall, the Viet Nam War, and all of the Pulitzer Prize photos since 1940.

We left at 5:00, when the museum closed.  As we walked out, I said, "The human race is horrible."

So it was a good change of mood to walk through the Pride Festival on our way home, although the fact that non-heterosexuals are persecuted in the first place is depressing.

That's when the rain started.

These bikers were having a good time, though:

Okay!  The sun is out again.  I'd be thinking about dinner, but we just ate last week's chocolate mice from Cocoluxe.  I guess I'll go read the research paper that I have to present in a week and a half:  Quantifying calcium channels in cerebellar granule cell boutons. (If you understood that, I'll buy your next coffee and you can explain it to me.)