halloweden:a v good day at one of my favorite places in the…
a v good day at one of my favorite places in the world AND the weather was perfect
I’d never actually visited it until a month ago. Which is odd, because I’ve been past it a bunch of times on the 1. But my wife finally got me to go.
It wasn’t what I expected. I mean, it was what I expected; in the sense that it was amazing. But I expected it to be… classier? Like, it has individual things (lots of them) that are off-the-charts breathtaking. I could have stared at those tapestries in the entry hall for hours. But the more I saw, the net effect of it all, jammed together without any apparent overall aesthetic plan other than “buy all this stuff and stick it in here; make it impressive; no, dammit, more impressive!” was something I hadn’t expected. I hadn’t expected it to be tacky.
It was like the opposite of the Getty. There wasn’t any sense of real appreciation in how it had been crammed together. It felt like ostentatious wealth for its own sake.
Maybe I was reacting more based on the particular time when I was seeing it. There was a guy in the entry area with a bright red tshirt with triumphant messaging about the election; I was happy he wasn’t on our bus or our tour. That may have primed me to see the parallels. But once I did they were overwhelming. The gold leaf and ostentatious narcissistic neediness. The inherited wealth, and using that wealth to try to buy things that would confer legitimacy, but stamping those things with his own crassness and vulgarity. The love-hate relationship with the old-money patrician types. The pursuit of politics: not to do good or have power per se, but again, to have status. The infidelity, and cycling through younger women as adornments, reflections of him. The fucking polar bear, trapped and neglected in its enclosure; like Marion, just a thing to have, not a being with its own life.
This all sounds horribly negative. I’m apologize; there were wonderful things there. But it was a little like going to see a movie that I had super high expectations for, only to notice an unexpected flaw and obsessing about it until the flaw became the only thing I could see.
I want to go back. Partly to spend more time experiencing the amazing stuff in the way it really does deserve. But even more to try to get at the weird dude behind it, to experience it as a museum that actually does offer a single, coherent vision: that of an unhappy man trying to project a classy image, but unable to avoid revealing the emptiness of his own values.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/2lbolmg.
