Tate Ah Tate

Friday was our last day in London. Between a week of hardcore "relaxation" all over the city and our extra long night and day on Thursday, we were running a bit low on energy, but still determined to make the most of the end of the trip. We started out by going to the Tate Modern, a noted modern art gallery in London.

We didn't expect to spend a lot of time there, I think -- and we did breeze through in just an hour or two. There are certainly some highlights in modern art worth seeing, but I must confess that I sometimes find it to be a bit of a put-on, being at its worst extremes an Emperor's New Cloak sort of situation. We saw examples of both.

There are two paintings by Pablo Picasso at the Tate Modern (here's one)...


...and a very neat painting by a favorite artist of mine, Salvador Dali:


There were also some interesting paintings and sculptures by artists who aren't giant names outside of the art world. One of my personal favorites tapped into a memory of mine from high school:


In my high school, we theater geeks had fairly unrestricted access to our performance auditorium. When a show wasn't actually in production, we'd sometimes go in to play around on the empty stage. We'd pull out scenery and set decorations from old shows, arrange them in weird ways on the stage that usually involved things being upside-down or precariously leaned against other leaning things. We'd light them with whatever bizarre colored lights happened to be leftover from the previous production, pull open the curtain, and present our bizarre creations to one another. They looked a lot like what's going on in this painting. I think we even referred to them as "modern art." Who knows, maybe we could have gotten an art gallery in London to display them?

But not everything at the Tate Modern inspired or dredged up fun memories. Some things were just strange:


I like to call it "You Promised When We Agreed to Let You Have a Sculpture That You Would Be the One to Clean Up After It."

But this was hardly the biggest load of crap in the art gallery. That would be this piece:


No, I'm not in the bathroom in this photo. I'm taking a picture of "Untitled Painting" by a pair of artists (yes, it took two people to come up with this), which the plaque on the wall tried to justify as art with this explanation:

"Since the Renaissance, painting has often been likened to a window on the world with central perspective giving the viewer a sense of surveying what is contained within the picture frame. In a bold gesture, [the artists] turn this century-old convention upside-down by replacing the painting's surface with a mirror. Rather than look at an image of the artist's making, viewers are now confronted by themselves, thereby questioning a long-held notion of painting transcending reality."

Yeah, right. Or somebody punked the art world by hanging a medicine cabinet on the wall of a gallery and calling it art.

Overall, I don't think I'd call the Tate Modern a highlight of our trip, but I would say it was just the right speed for our last day in London... a leisurely couple of hours punctuated with a few interesting and unique things.