4.11.2025 - Weekly Digest
4.07.2025
I went to the museum of arts and fineries. I don't take pictures in museums. It's a thing I'm snobbish about. Put your phone away you vulgar wretch. Here are some erudite descriptions of what I saw there.
Greek stuff. Amphoras I think. Amphorae? A two-sided bust of Athena and Cupid and a real life woman and a real life man leaning in like they’re about to make out with the face on their side. Now you see it’s a video and the humans tremble struggling to maintain stillness.
Also some vases and sprinklers and shot glasses incorporated into religious rites to provide an excuse to drink.
There's a cougar on a horse over there. A headless blue Venus de Milo.
Sarcophagi are made of stone, coffins of wood. Mummy servants were replaced with figurines that became very popular. In the Nile Delta they traded these like Pokemon.
African masks were sometimes adorned with ivory and beads made from conch shells to show off the wearer's wealth. Their value was proportionate to how difficult they were to procure.
Gold bracelets, blood diamonds, Iphones, Cabbage Patch Kids back in the day and I just read that braces are now a status symbol in the U.S. because our healthcare system is a horror film.
4.08.2025
I did a terrible job of recording artists' names and titles on my museum visit. And I don't have permission to post anything from their press gallery so you're stuck with my wandering verbal descriptions.
Close up photo of a man by a Chinese artist – himself, I think – naked and covered in flies and excrement and dirt. He smeared himself with oils and honey and took up residency in an outhouse for several days. This would just be an interesting stunt like that woman sucking her own toes on a three hour loop at the MCA in Chicago but the outhouse is apparently in the shadow of a brand new gleaming skyscraper for wealthy tenants in Beijing. Take that ya Communist hypocrites.
Iron sculpture, kinda angular with spikes sticking out of it. Reminds me of Joan Miro and I’m thinking he stole his whole style from an ancient tribe. Then I go back later and read the placard (Fr: placard) and it’s from another Spanish guy who was a contemporary of Miro’s so maybe he ripped him off in his own way and the chain of theft goes back to a cave in Lascaux where paleolithic folk painted animals in 2D and alien gods with light shining from their heads.
Animation by a local artist, history of Africans in the Americas. Don’t know the word for the genre but it’s in a washy transitional style I associate with studio tags before feature films or old PBS bits and the way it rolls from slave ships to plantations to the Underground Railroad to MLK to a kid sitting at a kitchen table with his grandma is hypnotic and next to me a toddler really wants to watch because it's a cartoon so his mom crouches down and gives him a whispered voiceover and he goes still like he understands and for the first time in a while I think we're maybe not yet dead.
4.09.2025
For once I don’t linger in the contemporary section though there are a lot of artists I like and recognize down there. Frank Stella’s Moby Dick series I’ve seen in other museums and it’s always hard to ignore. Also a Calder fan and I get a little thrill at the shadows of leaves on the floor before looking up to see one of his mobiles hanging over half the gallery.
Guard asks me to swing my shoulder bag around so it’s in front like a bulky hip pack. It's important, he explains, not to knock into anything and cause a catastrophe. I go forth so arranged.
Stargazing. This is only a couple of rooms and the theme is unclear. I mean there are some stars, references to constellations, and big rocks I assume are from outer space or somewhere near there.
A 'Seat of the World' piece that’s a literal chair resting on a big marble painted to look like a globe. Bookcase extending from a tall divining rod. Painting of a cage or maybe a grounded parachute.
I really don't know what I'm looking at.
Maybe the whole exhibit is a conceptual piece - you're supposed to make your own connections between elements, like picking out asterisms in the night sky. An experiential collage. A walk-in puzzle.
Or maybe that's enough art and I should go find a hockey game to look at. I look out at the rain, calculate how long it will take me to walk back, err on the side of more art for now.
4.10.2025
Last stop in the Musee de Beaux Arts: Indigenous Initiatives.
A catchy chant plays over the speaker. Gold heart on a pillow under glass. A blown up and altered postcard of a meeting between a tribal chief and a mounty. Superimposed word bubbles over their heads. The chief is saying ‘circle’; the Canadian says ‘square’. Title: 'Do Not Mistake Politeness for Agreement'.
In Traverse City the only safe way for a pedestrian to reach the lakefront from downtown is a short tunnel under the state highway. The passage is enhanced on each side by a mural, in panels, celebrating the stories and myths and symbols of the Anishinaabe peoples: wolves, fish, canoes, all rendered in a rich and dreamy style.
I walked through it almost every night of the three years I lived there and let me offer this warning: the tunnel is also host to massive untamed spider colonies and if you’re in the know you walk down the center to discourage them from dropping on your head.
Anyway the panel I always noticed first is a depiction of a child with kaleidoscopic ribbons extending from his mouth down the front of his torso.
I always wondered if the artist wasn't making a statement about the crassness and overindulgence of the tourists that overrun the area half the year. The tunnel itself is at the epicenter of the fairway for The National Cherry Festival in July, when the whole town is rerouted and rearranged, festooned with pop-up tents, Tilt-a-Whirls and zipper rides barely nailed down, a stage where the likes of Nelly and Jeff Foxworthy perform for sunburned partiers smashed on fruit wine.
Naturally, the festival scene includes little kids throwing up Sno Cones and elephant ears and other fried and frozen crap while their parents wander around all sweaty and stressed. That's where my mind went whenever I saw this piece.
I was really hoping it meant something else and not wanting to be irresponsible or taint his work with my cynicism, I reached out to the artist who painted it. His name is Bobby Magee Lopez and he does a lot of fantastic work all over the country.
Here's what he said about that particular image:
"This painting references an image that the Anishinaabe gave me. The juxtaposition of youthful innocence with the sharpness of the arrows represents the inevitable destiny that we all share. Him gnawing on his sleeve was inherent in the photo."
I'm grateful for his response, and glad to be wrong. I reckon there's a valuable lesson about art here and I'll let you figure that out for yourself.
Learn more about the mural here:
And see more of Bobby's awesome work here:
Bobby Magee Lopez https://www.bobbymageelopez.com/public