Goodbye, Paris

Just wanted to let you know: I'm back in New York and missing Paris - especially since I'm studying for the bar exam! Studying means that I won't be able to put up the reviews of the last couple weeks' worth of museums I visited until August sometime. But: I made it to 100 museums in Paris! My title of dork-queen is assured.

Recommendation Roundup #2

It’s day 133, and I’ve been on 98 visits to museums (including some repeats and out of town trips), leading to a batting average of 0.7 museums a day. Not quite the titular “a Paris museum a day,” but close enough that I’m starting to scare myself a little. So – time for our randomly scheduled Recommendation Roundup #2!

As Essential as a Baguette

• Musée d’Orsay (“make time for people-watching, a.k.a. ‘Paris’ Funniest Tourist Meldowns’”)
• Louvre (“what seemed like every tourist in Paris, mostly wandering helplessly or running around with small infants screaming “Where baby changing room?!?” at museum guards”)
• Centre Pompidou (“I and a bunch of other jet-setting twenty-somethings are all on our computers, although I hope that no one else is googling ‘Paris apartment how to turn on water’”)

• Château de Versailles (“Just a little note to say that it will always start to rain when you get to the point of the gardens farthest away from the exit”)

As Much to be Avoided as Leftover Snails

• Institut du Monde Arabe (“This place is chock-a-block with little sh*ts, and is such an informational desert that I started humming the theme song from A Fistful of Dollars”)
• Musée Cognacq-Jay (“erotic genre scene paintings, which include what seem to be white slave and maid-on-mistress action”)
• L’Adresse: Musée de la Poste (“Are you the Rain Man? If so, you’ll love this museum”)
• Musée des Arts Décoratifs (“I’m pretty sure that this museum is like an abusive relationship")
• Maison de Balzac (“a big splotch of disappointment on my day”)
• Musée de la Contrefaçon (“organized by a manufacturers’ association which wants you to pay a couple of Euro for the privilege of walking through an infomercial about the evils of counterfeiting”)
• Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (“how can “upholstered in python-skin” seem so good in concept and yet be so lame in execution?”)
• Le Cabinet d’histoire du Jardin des Plantes (“On the plus side, it’s only about five rooms, and the exhibitions seems to rotate frequently, if you like your tedium contained and varied”)

• Museum of the Parisian Sewers (“a huge boat that sewer workers ride in the biggest tunnels, like sewer pirates, lords of the shit sea!”)

• City of Sciences and Industry (“the only kid I saw who appeared to be actually engaged in an exhibition was, on closer inspection, just leaning on the exhibition and playing his Gameboy”)

• National Museum of the Sea (“displays that make you want to gouge out your own eyes”)

• Bourdelle Museum (“it’s hard for me to make an unbiased judgment, considering just how much I hate the style of Rodin and, by extension, Bourdelle”)

• Museum of the Art and History of Judaism (“Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Judaism, But Were Afraid Would Be Too Boring to Ask About (And Guess What – You’re Right!)”)

• Historical Center of the National Archives: Museum of the History of France (“If your life is not complete without carved wooden paneling, check it out”)

• Museum of the Historical Collections of the Police Prefecture (“In my mind, my visit was going to be like making out with Sherlock Holmes while McGruff the Crime Dog brought us brandy from a cask around his neck”)

• Pavillion of the Arsenal (“Yawn-fest”)

• Museum of the Romantic Life (“by calling it the Museum of the Romantic Life you assure that some people will be fool enough to visit your craptastic collection”)

• Sea Center – Oceanographic Institute (“signage which looked like it was produced by a kindergarten teacher to decorate her classroom”)

• Doll Museum (“some arty concept-fashion dolls who are shown shaking their bare, and disturbingly realistic, tatas”)

• Erotic Museum (“neither a museum nor especially erotic”)

• Henri Cartier Bresson Foundation (“Soooooo many photographs of bleak factory landscapes”)

Like Foie Gras: You’re in Paris, So You Should Give it a Try

• Musée de la Franc-Maconnerie (“it was like Christmas and my birthday rolled up into one perfectly-sized collection of assorted weirdass”)
• Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (“balls-out decorative gilded mishmash”)
• Musée National Eugène Delacroix (“all of his female saints seem to be experiencing an ecstasy only partially spiritual”)
• Musée de l’Assistance Publique et Hôpitaux de Paris (“It’s totally worth going to this museum just to see the reactions of your friends – no one I’ve told so far has been able to resist laughing at the spectacular nerdiness of a trip to what is basically a Museum of Medicare”)
• Palais du Tokyo (“there were some cushions set up with a sign announcing story-time for 3 year olds next to a replica of the Unabomber’s cabin, but I wasn’t around for long enough to hear what sort of fairy tales those were”)
• Musée Guimet (“don’t be scared away by the probability that you’ll be the only person in the building who doesn’t possess a CD of whale sounds set to soft jazz”)
• Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature (“Just forget the Louvre – proceed directly here from the airport”)

• Museum of the History of Medicine (“a decorative table top made out of dried blood, slices of liver, and human ears”)

• Catacombs of Paris (“a strange combination of the tedious and the bizarre, like going out to dinner with both Alan Greenspan and Marilyn Manson”)

• City of Architecture and Patrimony (“the most intense spatial analysis I perform is trying to answer the question ‘I wonder where they put the bathroom?’”)

• Holocaust Memorial (“my only complaint is that its name doesn’t do it justice – it’s a complex”)

• Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art (“Watch French toddlers frolic amidst his paintings of cartoonish and yet sexually suggestive tomcats!”)

• The Red House - Antoine de Galbert Foundation (“am I supposed to know about Polish avant-garde electronic music?”)

• Pasteur Museum (“contemplate still-well-preserved rabbit spinal cords in jars and visit Mr. and Mrs. Pasteurs’ bedrooms, just down the hall (in case he had a hankering to preserve some rabbit in the middle of the night?)”)

• National Gustave Moreau Museum (“a mixture of Christian imagery with classical lore with sexy androgyny with blood with Indian architecture with hot demons”)

• City of Music (“18^th century music boxes used to teach birds how to sing (META)”)

Kinda like Tripe: Good if That’s Your Thing

• Museum of the Order of the Liberation (“Imagine digging through old trunks in the attic with your grandparents while they reminisce – if your grandparents were members of the French Resistance…”)
• “Paris Inondé 1910” (“What happens to polar bears when the zoo floods?”)
• Le Laboratoire (“neuroreceptors, the anthropology of space, and set theory which magically produce an algorithm which is to be translated into a building by a spider-like robot excreting bio-concrete”)
• Musée National du Moyen Age (“if you’re only going to like one set of tapestries, this is it (says me, who usually gets the dry heaves at the idea of looking at tapestries)”)
• Musée de Montmartre (“it needs a combination of Molly Ringwald and Thomas Hoving to clean up the flaking paint, throw away the cheesy/creepy mannequins, and whip up some better signage”)
• Musée de la Monnaie (“a perfect place to send your visiting parents for a morning while you run errands (aka, sleep off a hangover)”)
• Maison Européenne de la Photographie (“big caveat, the guy who showed me the most attention did have a goatee”)
• Musée de la Mode et du Textile (“well-organized signage in French and English, which I’m sure would have been very informative if I hadn’t spent the entire time thinking ‘pretty pretty WANT’”)
• Musée Jacquemart-André (“just to give you insight into the mysterious mind of an art historian, here’s what’s going on when we spent hours joyfully screaming at each other in a collector’s house museum: it’s like going on Maury to argue about paternity tests”)
• Musée Marmottan-Monet (“don’t be fooled into giving up your coat – I myself have vowed that the Marmottan-Monet Museum is the last time my fingers will turn into little ice-lumps.”)
• Musée Dapper (“one could describe the exhibition as 150 randomly-selected objects worn by dudes from several centuries ago to the present over a large portion of the globe’s landmass”)
• Maison de Victor Hugo (“the sheer enthusiasm shown by the French nation for their favorite literary lion – it’s like when a cute little kid insists on explaining how their Pokemon cards work (“and then, he moved to the Chanel Islands – bam! and then, Les Misérables was like level up!”)
• Grande Galerie de l’Evolution (“profound thought: giraffes are TALL”)
• Musée Carnavalet (“the third floor is a must-see if you start to feel all tingly at the thought of seeing the makeup kit Marie Antoinette used in prison”)
• Petit Palais (“if the security guards have time and inclination enough to make cute little jokes, you can be sure that the museum is delightfully obscure enough that their lives aren’t poisoned by tourists asking ‘is THIS where the Da Vinci code thing was?’”)

• Museum of Tea (“ridiculously attractive men in linen suits inquire about your deepest tea desires”)

• Grand Palais (“one of the main habitats for a fascinating French species, the Exhibitionist Retiree”)

• Jeu de Paume (“Painfully hip – for example, you leave your coat and bag in a transparent locker in the lobby, so that nobody misses a moment of your totebag from a Swedish book bindery”)

• Cernuschi Museum (“seems to have a total of three visitors at any one time, at least one of which got lost on the way to the Louvre”)

• Nissim de Camondo Museum (“if you want to see top-of-the-19^th-c.-line kitchens and bathrooms, here’s your chance”)

• National Natural History Museum: Zoo of the Plant Garden (“merits a solid ‘meh’”)

• Museum of Public Relations (“one notable commercial I watched featured, thanks to the miracles of computer animation, a buxom naked woman crouching inside of a giant condom, riding around in a sea of swimming penises”)

• Pierre Berge and Yves Saint Laurent Foundation (“Good job with the spooky rotating manikins”)

• Discovery Palace (“learn about sensory perception from tanks of electric fish”)

• Institute of the Arab World - Take Two (“when are you going to have another chance to chat with the dude who makes Hermès saddles featuring embroidered gold lace?”)

• Jean-Jacques Henner Museum (“go if you like Henner or if, like Henner, you like plump, pale, auburn-headed girls”)

• Clemenceau Museum (“an audio guide which only sporadically functioned – e.g., it went on and on about his childhood cradle, but refused to say anything when I punched in the number next to a set of dueling pistols”)

• Adam Mickiewicz Museum, Boleslas Biegas Museum, and Chopin Salon (“enthusiasm about random stuff”)

• Zadkine Museum (“’hey… if I polish this clump of tree roots enough it’ll look like a butt!’”)

• Claude Monet Foundation (“Visiting the house is like walking around on a not-too-high-budget movie set – Whose Water? Whose Lilies? The Claude Monet Story”)

• Arts and Professions Museum (“‘Look honey – this car has a propeller!’”)

Special Dispatches:

• Fitzwilliam Museum (“a museum dependant on the whims of the eccentric cast of characters who decided that the National Gallery was just too concerned with authenticity or importance when accessing donations”)
• Ashmolean Museum (“probably still an essential part of your visit to Oxford, but you’ll have to cross my picket line – I’ll be the one holding the sign that says ‘Righteous Indignation!’”)
• Pitt-Rivers Museum (“a bush-whack through a thick forest of random objects so bizarre and wonderful that you emerge feeling both ecstatic and a bit nauseous”)
• Gallery of the Academy (“awash with disappointed tourists”)
• Medici-Riccardi Palace (“’Hey Jesus – you need some myrrh? We got your myrrh right here!’”)
• Medici-Riccardi Palace, Museum of Marbles (“a new museum in its basement, right by the toilets (just follow the smell of open drains)”)
• Silver Museum (“the Medicis out-blinged any MTV Cribs episode ever”)
• Palatine Gallery (“ceilings adorned with mythological scenes painted in the 19^th century ‘naked hero with conveniently placed sword because we don’t look at genitals, no no no’ style”)
• Modern Art Gallery (“a tabletop sculpture of a secretly pregnant nun, cowering in a corner”)
• Laurentian Library (“cramped wooden benches onto which the books were chained, leading me to picture all Renaissance scholars as kleptomaniac dwarfs”)
• Uffizi (“the Ron Jeremy of museums”)
• The Last Supper of the Church of St. Apollonia (“all the Apostles look like rough characters who just got done with a long day of stealing whiskey down at the wharfs”)
• Strozzi Palace (“mainly notable for being open on Mondays”)

May 20: Musée de l’érotisme (Erotic Museum)

I have two problems with the name “Erotic Museum”: this pace is neither a museum nor especially erotic. You’re paying to see the collections of the owners of the space, who apparently make buying decisions based solely on whether or not the object featured visible genitalia without considering whether or not the object is, say, actually from the time or location the seller claimed for it. Thus, the first couple of floors (there are seven levels) are filled with fake pre-Columbia terracottas of dudes with erections, fake African carvings of dudes with erections, fake Indian miniatures of dudes with erections, etc. Yep, this is what my art historical training has equipped me for: detecting fake dicks.

The most worthwhile collection is a series of photographs and other documentation covering early to mid 20^th century French brothels, but again this falls short of actual eroticism, since the snapshots of prostitutes left me thinking “you risked syphilis for THAT?”

There are two special exhibitions, which when I visited were a mixed bag (one was good, with funny cartoons of erotic Tarzan and Jane; the other was paintings of wolves with knives doing very very disturbing things to women).

May 19: Musée des Arts et Métiers (Arts and Professions Museum)

This museum, which covers the history of technology, focusing on the late 18^th to mid 20^th century, is probably the best museum in the world for a few people, an interesting enough visit for a larger group, and torturously dull for the majority of potential visitors. To help you determine into what category you might fall, I’ve crafted a description of the Mettiyay family, every member of which enjoyed their visit. In my mind. Anyway:

• Dad: A man who possesses a full set of screwdrivers and can occasionally tell what’s going wrong with the car just by listening to the noises it makes. He’ll love the section on early automobiles as well as the models of workshops and collections of neat-o machines through the ages. Sample quote: ‘Look honey – this car has a propeller!”
• Mom: An intellectual dabbler who watches a lot of documentaries. She’ll appreciate the insights into technological aspects of her favorite arty areas, like photography and architecture. Sample quote: “Oh, so the dissemination of mass journalism was possible only after the invention of more efficient wood pulping machines as well as the cylinder press!”
• Rebellious Teenage Daughter: A smart girl, but going though, you know, a phase. She’ll be secretly entrances by the aesthetic of the museum as a whole – it’s like the concentrated essence of steam punk: elaborate brass and rosewood machines! creepy 19^th century protective masks! airplanes hanging in the nave of a deconsecrated church! Sample quote: “Well, I guess that this room of automatons sucks less than everything else on this stupid family vacation.”
• Kid Brother: What started as a toddler’s love of Thomas the Tank Engine has blossomed into a full-blown obsession with all things mechanical. Sure, he’ll lose interest when puberty hits, but at the moment he’s able to decipher the slightly too-technical signage for the benefit of the rest of the family (though in return he’ll demand to spend all afternoon in the section on the history of heavy construction equipment). Sample quote: “So the final refinements of the waterwheel occurred only after the popularization of steam power… fascinating!”

Hope that helps!

May 16: Art Home at Palais de Tokyo (Tokyo Palace)

I’ve written before about the central role of the café or restaurant in the museums of Paris, so it’s fitting that the Palais de Tokyo created an art installation with is basically just a glass box perched on their roof in which they serve lunch and dinner. It’s only running for a couple of months, and there are only 12 places at the table, so act fast if you, too, want to brag about being all arty! They accommodate vegetarians, although after telling the maître d’ that I ate eggs, he then brought me an appetizer composed of fish eggs. Guess who lost the argument (“It’s fish.” “No, it’s eggs, and you told me that you eat eggs!”) and was rewarded with a second appetizer with another type of fish eggs. The things I suffer for your sake, dear reader.

Special Dispatch from Florence: May 13: Palazzo Strozzi (Strozzi Palace)

The Strozzi Palace, formerly home to one of the wealthy Florentine families who dared to rival the Medicis, now holds a large special exhibition space which is mainly notable for being open on Mondays, when the rest of Florentine museums take a day of rest. Ok, ok, sometimes they will have a really well-done exhibition, but they tend to do modern artists in a “really, now you’re stretching it” kind of way – for example, the two whole rooms in the current Giorgio Di Chirco exhibition which are devoted to Giorgio’s deservedly less-known brother, also a tortured modernist painter. Also, if you’re going to put Balthus is the title of an exhibition, I think you should include more than three paintings by him, no?

Special Dispatch from Florence: May 12: Il Cenacolo di Sant’Apollonia (The Last Supper of the Church of St. Apollonia)

Renaissance artists were often commissioned to paint whole-wall murals of the Last Supper in the dining halls of monasteries and convents, so that religious people could contemplate the most religious dinner party ever. I am kinda obsessed with these Last Suppers, and this one, by Andrea del Castagno, is my favorite, for its early attempt at unified perspective which results in a chopped open doll’s house approach to scene-setting. Plus all the Apostles look like rough characters who just got done with a long day of stealing whiskey down at the wharfs. And Andrea was clearly super, super excited about faux marbling. It’s free, so pop in for a visit next time you’re in Florence, and say hi to Paolo and Francesca, the two starlings that keep sneaking in past the guard and fly around, trying to pick up fictive crumbs.