Tate Liverpool
Feb. 25th, 2005 12:07 pm
Went into Liverpool yesterday to get a couple of things. I ended up (finally) with the first part of Les Miserables, some fresh mint and okra, and beer brewed by some trappist monks in the French Alps, or something.
Chris and I went to see the William Blake exhibition at one of the galleries in Liverpool, because Becky + Blake = OTP. Actually, that's a lie, because Yeats would totally make it a menage a trois.
Anyway, we ended up at the Tate on the docks, and were completely side-tracked. There was an excellent exhibition of Cubist works on. I absolutely love that movement, and though jaffacakequeen and I weren't too impressed with some of Picasso's works at the museum in Barcelona, there were some excellent paintings there. One was a Cubist-style work whereby a woman was reduced to a collage of geometric shapes. It was incredibly eerie.
Now, museums in Britain are, for the main part, free, right? This is a very good thing, but it also means that they're funded by the taxpayer. I am very happy for my money to go towards art rather than war, but dude... there were two pieces of canvas, right? This was a work by an Iranian artist living in London, and she will have received thousands of pounds for her work.
There was a large piece of white canvas, and a large piece of black canvas, adjacent to one another. That was her entire piece. The notice said that it was "an indictement of Western culture and Western materialsim...a scathing look at religious intolerance."
The hell? I'm all for reading between the lines, but it was two pieces of canvas...arrgh. This means that Ikea must be a veritable mecca for religious expression.
I ranted about it to mum today. She said that the idea is probably to laugh at the well-meaning people and their Emperor's New Clothes who would be so decadent as to pay thousands for such a thing.
I have a sneaking feeling that she's right.