Art Museum (Belatedly)

Apparently we were supposed to blog about the art museum we went to when we were on the Honors trip to Memphis.

Do you really want my honest opinion of it? Hmm... How about a selectively honest opinion? I don't really like modern art... and a pile of shredded tires on a pedestal is not art. No matter if you slap a fancy title on it (that one was called 'Untitled', if I remember correctly...), it's still a pile of shredded tires. And the Tele-o-belisk (or whatever it was) in the lobby was sort of... blinding. But I agree with Audrey over at Curiosity of a Lion- the work of Carl Gutherz was very good, especially the two titled 'Arcessitu Ab Angelis' and what I think was called 'Light of the Incarnation'. The medieval art section was superb. Of course, most of it was religious art, but I definitely don't mind that. I like it! There was also a long painting depicting Apollo and Artemis slaughtering the children of Niobe that was good in a sort of morbid way.

(For those of you who are not nerds like me, the Greek myth went that Niobe, a mortal woman, bragged that she was better than Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, because she had more children. So Apollo and Artemis went and killed all of Niobe's children. Niobe then cried ceaselessly until Zeus turned her into a rock. And the rock still shed tears. And scientists named an element after her. Seriously. Look it up on the Periodic Table. Niobium. There's tantalum, too- after Tantalus, the dude in the Underworld who was always hungry and thirsty but though he stood in the middle of a lake and under a fruit-laden tree he was cursed to never be able to eat or drink. Where do you think we got the verb 'to tantalize'? Yeah... I'm a nerd.)

In Pace Christi,

Elyse