Sadly, that sounds like something I would geek out to in the extreme.
I’m bored to death of the Gene Autry museum. I’ve been a few times. My husband loves to go - but I can only stare at the wall full of guns for so long before my brain shuts down (and that’s all he wants to see. He just wants to bask in the glory of Buffalo Bill’s gun). The last time he got me in there was for an Albert Bierstadt exhibition, which I would have gladly seen all day. When I was a kid I loved the blue screen thing where you sit in a saddle and act out a part in a silent film, but it’s a little unseemly to ham it up like I used to now that I’m approaching 30.
That’s OK though, I’m punishing him back by making him take me to the Getty Villa for the Piranesi exhibit.
In the early 1980’s, when Red China first started opening to the West, I wrote a guidebook to SW China. I had the dubious pleasure of visiting dozens and dozens of communist era museums as well as communist museums. Seeing the meeting rooms of some famous communist meeting that took place in the 1920’s is a real treat, I tell ya. Rivaled perhaps by some dusty backwater city’s museum on agriculture production.
There are some world class museums in China now, but not 20 years ago. Recently went to the Shanghai Natural History Museum, and it hadn’t changed since my wife visited as a little girl 30 years ago. Has some real dinosaur fossils (not replicas) exhibits that were pretty cool for dinosaur manic kids.
I don’t hate you, but it doesn’t sound like you’ve got a hate-on for that particular museum; you just don’t like going to art museums. That’s fine; I never go to sporting events, as they bore me to tears. I can just assure you that “if you liked that sort of thing, this would be the sort of thing you would like.”
I’ve been to the Canadian equivalent: Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Maybe I was missing something, but it seemed to be nothing but suitcases beside photos of people who were carrying the suitcases as they got off the ship. Nice to hear that this particular suitcase belonged to Paddy O’Reilly of County Cork (and that’s him in the photo), but there’s little else of interest in what I saw.
Perhaps the poster doesn’t mind art, just not that particular kind. I was in New York once with an art-junkie. She made us visit all those galleries of the Metropolitan Museum. Yawn! And double yawn! How many icons and paintings of saints and baby Jesuses can one take in one day?
But (I’m speaking for myself here), I was fascinated when we went to the medieval part of the Metropolitan: the Cloisters, in uptown Manhattan. Intricate ivory carvings, beautifully calligraphed prayer books and such, the Unicorn tapestries, and lovely architecture to boot. That’s where I woke up, and thoroughly enjoyed my visit to the Metropolitan. Maybe it’s a matter of preference and taste.
Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington. The time I visited, the greeter remarked how she didn’t like the job, and I didn’t see anything that spectacularly justified my tax contribution. I’ve been told by some to give it another chance, and I might do – but it certainly didn’t thrill me first time out.
Correct. So is the Amsterdam Torture Museum. Both are 100 % commercially run dingy exhibitions on prime locations, and both spend more effort (flyers, advertisements) trying to lure in tourists, then into offering something worthwhile to see.
I see no one here has been to the Barbed Wire Museum in LaCrosse, Kansas.
If you already like to see barbed wire, then this is your place. If you want to be given some idea of why someone thought barbed wire was interesting enough to make a museum about, avoid it.
And for the record, I love the Boston Science Museum and the Henry Ford Museum (though I’ll admit that Greenfield Village doesn’t do much for me).
I was living in Wellington when construction started - I remember the weekend when they moved the old museum building - but I moved back to Australia before Te Papa was completed. When I was back in Wellington a few years ago I finally got to see it. And I thought it was overrated. Good, but it didn’t live up to the hype. But still streets ahead of the very dull National Museum of Australia in Canberra.
Spot on. I’ve noted this phenomenon too often. I much prefer the old-style, unflashy museum with some **real ** content so that you actually learn something.
Altesmuseum in Berlin. Beautiful neo-classical facade. Lovely to sit outside. Grouchy staff and more Grecian pots than this philistinic mind can appreciate.
Well, you’re asking the wrong person – my most recent trip to Spain included a period I like to call “ten cathedrals in ten days,” and left me able to use words such as “apse,” “transept,” and “ambulatory” in casual conversation. But the poster said they didn’t like art, not that they didn’t like this kind of art.
True, I’m not an art fan in general, but while I really can’t remember specifics, I do remember liking the Guggenheim when I went there about ten years ago. I guess it has to be the right type of art? I dunno, a lot of things look boring to me (as lot of medieval and renaissance art, for example) but the occasional modern art piece (let’s call modern art late 19th to current, even though that might not be the “official” definition) appeals to me.
But it has to look like it took actual skill. Jackson Pollack? Ok, art history majors will tell me it takes great skill to get his composition this way, and the color that way, but to me it looks like some lazy fuck threw a bunch of paint at a canvas for five minutes. Big whoop-de-doo. I wish I could tell you more of what I like, but I can really only identify it when I see it, and I don’t care about who did it or anything lie that. (Well, I can tell you I like those weird long, skinny-legged elephant paintings, though I don’t know the artist, and the paintings actually freak me out a little, but in a good way.)
The Pasta Museum in Rome and The Museum of Pain and Torture in Florence were both big disappointments, but the Pasta Museum has the edge on pure drudgery. It was also bigger and half-way through, I became convinced that I would never, ever be allowed to leave.
When me and my brother were about ten, we were on a family holiday and stopped off at some convent in Germany that had some areas open to the public. The plan had been to spend an hour or so there but the nuns grabbed us and took us on an excrutiating THREE HOUR tour in which they explained all the stories in the tapestries about ten minutes per tapestry. My brother and I kept oozing to the back and one of the nuns kept finding us and kindly bringing us to the front again so we didn’t miss a single, thrilling word. AUGH!
The transportation museum in Tokyo (Chiyoda-ku) is dreadfully dull, and nowhere near the quality of every other museum in Tokyo I’ve been to (multiple trips to the National Museum of Science & Nature and the Edo-Tokyo Museum).
I’ve never been to the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, so I can’t claim that it’s particularly dull. I’ve never been interested enough to go, though.
But the poster said they didn’t like art, not that they didn’t like this kind of art.