| | Yes, I am doing part 2 first. Now that we got that out of the way.. our second day of museum trekking took us to the most famous of Athenian museums: the Athens Archaeological Museum. This is me in front of it!  Inside are some pretty famous pieces, although honestly the rest of the world has some of the more famous works of art from the Ancient Greek world. The Louvre in Paris has probably the most famous one, the Venus de Milo. But of course there is also the infamous Elgin Marbles, which are currently at the British Museum in London. The Met Museum of art in NYC also has a HUGE collection of Greek sculpture and many Roman copies as well. Just so you can see some of the art that the Athens museum has to offer, I am going to offer you my favorites smattered along the way here.  One of the more interesting things at the beginning of museum is the collection of the Kouros, which is the depiction of the ancient Greek ideal male. There is also the Kure, which is ideal female (basically Beyonce's body).  I mean.. as you can see I am pretty close on this one. I wanted to strip and really see how I measured up, but I was told that would be "inappropriate". For anyone who knows about Egyptian art, this might look very similar to some Egyptian statues from around the same period. However, as you can see from what is inside museums all over the world, the Greeks took things a lot farther than the Egyptians ever did. The Greek sculptors quite quickly developed more imaginative and created much more unique, specific, and realistic works. There were quite a few other neat sculptures, and we spent the majority of our time walking through and examining them. And as usual I clowned around a bit.
After we walked through the neolithic section, as well as the Cycladic art, we visited the Egyptian collection. It was pretty good, although not as large as the Met's collection in NYC.  And of course I saw a lot more, um, in Egypt. Anyway, on our way out of Egyptian, we witnessed this tourist posing next to a mummy case, and just as her friend was about to snap the picture, the room attendant stopped her and said something in Greek and motioned to the way her arms were crossed, as if to tell her to uncross them. After the young lady apologized, I asked Constantine to ask her why she had stopped them from taking the picture, just out of curiosity. The woman explained that the mummy was a statement in itself, and that the young woman didn't need to comment on it by mimicking its pose, and that it was disrespectful to the art to do so. The woman explained that the mummy alone was worth photographing. I was perplexed. So this wasn't a museum rule, I thought, just a preference of that woman in that particular room. After all as you can see I imitated the Kouros just downstairs and nobody stopped me. I voiced my objection and Maria said, well, it's that woman's room to watch over and she has the right to do what she wants in her room. I then thought to myself.. oh really? So if I am the room moderator of a room can I send away people wearing blue because it reflects onto the statues and disrespects the color the artist chose for the originals? Or can I tell people they are not allowed to speak in front of the art as any talking disrespects it? We got in quite a discussion about it and Constantine pointed out that maybe this young woman was merely trying to make a connection to the art, and after all one should be grateful that a young person wants to come to a museum to see where she came from, and how the people from a different time have chosen to be remembered. Maybe she SHOULD be mimicking the art, in fact, as a way of understanding herself better. I still thought it was kind of lame that this woman would try to make up some random rules according to her own criteria, and not the museums. It annoyed me. So I started breaking things. Expensive things.. no I'm kidding, but Constantine and I did become sort of delirious at that point and started making fun of everything.
We had seen nearly everything the museum had to offer, but we had not seen any of the pottery on the second floor yet, and it had already been over 3 hours. The pottery collection is absolutely huge, from the older geometric pottery, to black figure pottery and then finally to red figure, so we knew we had to go up and at least walk through.  When we got upstairs, we started entertaining ourselves in ways which we thought were pretty funny, although Albertina and Maria didn't quite feel the same about it. OK so I'm sure you know how we always say, "yes queen" to someone who is living their life to the fullest, or wearing a really extravagant outfit, or freaking out in public over something. Well, sometimes you can say yes_______ if you want to.. for instance Karen was watching TV and this woman was drinking Vodka and living for it so Karen said, out loud (even though she was alone) "Yes Vodka!". Or, when Karen and I were watching the Olympics we kept seeing that Claritin commercial with Shannon Miller, the former Olympic gymnast. It was clear that she had had a very significant rhinoplasty since her younger years, so every time we saw her commercial we just shouted out.. "Yes nose job!" I think you get the drift.  So Constantine started looking at all the vases that had really long and complicated names and saying things like, "Yes Attica red figure Bell-krater depicting the return of Persephone to her mother, the goddess Demeter.. get it! You are fierce! Live!" It was so funny and became even funnier the longer the titles became. We were laughing really hard. And then Constantine became even more hilarious because he was looking at the pots and saying things like, "Well, this one is OK but its just giving me weird colors and its too busy-- I prefer sleeker and cleaner lines.. like Calvin Klein home decor stuff-- its just a little more streamlined and simple, which I like. I mean what are these people on here giving me? Its like I don't know what I am looking at. I am sure this is just a trend that will go out as quickly as neon colors in the 80s." It was so so so so so funny. At that point we realized it was time for us to go home, and we did. |
| | Posted 8/25/2008 9:41 AM - 9 Views - 4 eProps - 2 comments
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