The National Gallery is “hanging 44 full-size recreations on walls ranging from Hamleys toy shop (a Seurat) to a sex shop in Soho (a Caravaggio) to give Londoners a taste of what it offers.” (more)
Category Archives: museums/archaeology
Neither one has really worked for me…
“But perhaps the biggest advantages of being an archaeologist are that you get a tan, and are able to meet and impress girls …” How to succeed in archaeology
For the big kid in your life…
More dinosaurs!
A quick catch-up on things around London:
A few Sundays ago I went on a trek to see Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Two Legs Good, Four Legs Bad at
Paradise Row. Last Sunday I wandered around Shoreditch looking for open galleries. Not much luck at first, except scaffolding pillars outside the Foundary were decorated in different styles, no idea who by.
The final gallery was Flowers East, where I really liked ‘The Person Who…….’ by Jiro Osuga – mostly paintings but there was a room with a table of toys and small paintings that folded out to show a different side.
I also saw Tim Berners-Lee speak (leave a comment or email me for my notes) on Tuesday, and saw Orfeo at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, both of which were really rather fabulous.
I went to see Kylie at the V&A today. It’s hard to believe they’ve devoted a whole exhibition to her, but it was actually surprisingly interesting to see the costumes. The early ones were a strange nostalgia trip and the later ones made me want to camp it up as a showgirl in a shiny outfit with a corset.
Update: after thinking about it more – I guess I expect to learn or have my thinking challenged in an exhibition, and I’m not sure that happened. So I hate to say it but overall it was more a display of pretty clothes than an exhibition.
Last night I went to see Self-sufficient at Foster Art, and the opening of the Kinetica Museum at Spitalfields. The Amorphic Robot Works wasn’t working last night but should be today. Some of the pieces in the Upper Gallery were fantastic.
Just found a report about Sudak from someone who was here earlier this month at archaeology.org with an interesting perspective.
The Natural History Museum’s Antarctic conservation blog “is written by Sarah Clayton, Nicola Dunn and Ainslie Greiner, and tells what it’s like spending the winter in Antarctica conserving artefacts from the explorer’s hut left behind by Ernest Shackleton in 1908.”
“Archaeologists studying an ancient mosaic found by workers laying cable south of Rome have been astonished to discover that it is an optical illusion.
Viewed one way up it is a bald old man with a beard, but turned the other way round it is a beardless youth.” (Guardian)