Sunday, October 29, 2006

Now That's What I Call Art!

On the first day of our recent visit to Paris we revisited the Musee d'Orsay. This is housed in an old railway station that is itself a work of art. It's amazing to think that the authorities were at one time thinking of demolishing it to make way for a giant hotel. On the lower levels of the museum there are some amazing examples of sculpture while the upper levels contain the impressionist and postimpressionist paintings that Wosog and I really like. Wouldn't it have been nice to bring home a little Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, a Renoir or a Van Gogh? Unfortunately, security arrangements at the museum meant that all we could take were photographs, but a guy can dream, can't he?

To me, this is real art: in total contrast with the pathetic modern "sculptures" etc we saw at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in April. These and other examples of modern art, such as those we struggled not to giggle at at the Modern Art Museum in Barcelona, to me have no more artistic validity than paintings made out of toast and marmite.

But then, I am a Philistine....