At the Biomorph Café...

... it's so organic.

The Houdini shop...

... outside of the "Houdini: Art and Magic" show.

At the Shadowy Figure Café...

... skies are slippery grey.

Gender difference.

You see it everywhere.

(Photo taken yesterday at the Chazen Museum in Madison.)

At the Museum Café...

... you can talk all night.

3 views of the new museum.

It's the new addition to the Chazen Museum on the University of Wisconsin—Madison campus. The glass sculpture in the case is "Large E. coli," by Luke Jerram.

American Atheists sue to keep the WTC cross out of the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

The cross, you may remember, is not something human beings constructed intentionally. It is steel that remained standing after the buildings collapsed. But it was noticed, honored, and preserved because of the Christian symbolism:

"This cross is now a part of the official WTC memorial. No other religions or philosophies will be honored. It will just be a Christian icon, in the middle of OUR memorial,” Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, said in a release.

Silverman added that the memorial must allow atheists and other belief groups to include their own displays of equal size. For the past several years the cross has been housed at St. Peter's church. On Saturday it was permanently moved to the 9/11 Memorial Museum after a ceremonial blessing at Zuccotti Park. The 9/11 Memorial Museum, which will officially open next year, said its mission is to tell the history of the attacks through artifacts like the cross.

"This steel remnant became a symbol of spiritual comfort for the thousands of recovery workers who toiled at ground zero, as well as for people around the world," said 9/11 Memorial President Joe Daniels. "In the historical exhibition, the cross is part of our commitment to bring back the authentic physical reminders that tell the story of 9/11 in a way nothing else can.”

I think the historic significance of the cross justifies its inclusion in the museum. Human beings cannot construct equivalent monuments for other religions, even if it were, in fact, legally required. Silverman's argument assumes that a historical museum is a free-speech forum that must be open to the speech of all groups, but that's not what a museum is.

Sometimes organizations file lawsuits not because they think they will win but to gain publicity for their cause. This is a case, however, of an organization drawing bad publicity, though, isn't it? I suppose this group seeks favor among a fairly small percentage of the population. If that is the goal, outraging the majority could feel like a good thing.

"Man Walking Down the Side of a Building."

Where's the line between art/dance and stuntwork? Don't let the fact that the building is an art museum muddle your thinking.

(Video.)

At the Zaha Hadid Café...

... you can talk about the "urban carpet" effect of architecture in a "somewhat declining downtown"... or anything else that might amuse you.

AND: Speaking of questionable interior space, you might what to weigh in on the redecoration of the Oval Office.

ALSO: Here's how LBJ had it:



I took that picture at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas.

"The Museum of Modern Art has turned down the volume on Yoko Ono's atrium art installation...."

Ha.

The installation features a microphone, speakers, and the instructions to visitors: "Scream against the wind/ against the wall/ against the sky" on the far wall. But according to museum employees, the loud, sporadic screams that resulted startled visitors, while staff members strained to speak to museum-goers over the noise. "It was disturbing to the staff at the information desk," said one employee who wished to remain anonymous because MoMA discourages its staff from commenting on artwork or internal affairs.

The Ono piece is featured prominently at the entrance to the museum's just-opened "Contemporary Art from the Collection" exhibition, a radical re-installation of its collection that adds nine Ono works. One employee said that the fitful, high-pitched screams caused visitors and even guards to jump with surprise. "Visitors complained," he said.

Shame on MoMA! They put Yoko Ono in there in the first place to lure the throngs of people who still pay attention to anything Beatles-related. Then, when the piece had its intended effect of startling and troubling people, they changed it, squelched it, undermining the artists' point to please the lame-oids they lured.

(Via Expecting Rain.)

"Meetings between great men don't always result in elevated colloquies; sometimes they tend towards the crudely basic."

For example:

When Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald met in Paris, at Le Dingo Bar on the rue Delambre in April 1925, Hemingway was disconcerted to be asked: "Did you have sex with your wife before you were married, Ernest?" They became friends, however. Their most intimate conversation (as reported by Hemingway) was also about wives. One evening, Scott Fitzgerald confessed to his friend that his wife, Zelda, had told him his penis was unusually small, and that he could never satisfy any woman. Hemingway said it was just typical of Zelda's undermining ways, but Scott wasn't reassured. So Hemingway asked him to come to the lavatory, where he inspected his friend's lance of manhood. Back in the bar, he explained:

"You're perfectly fine," I said. "You're okay. There's nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile." Now there was an act of friendship between creative giants, if not an especially artistic conversation.

Oh, I think it's artistic as hell.

"I was inspired to make a sculpture and studied many other logs, but I realized that I was only interested in this particular one."

I love this line of wall card next to a sculpture at the museum:



That line made me — and, independently, Meade — think of the way the Little Prince felt about the rose he loved. Eventually, the Prince encounters a garden of roses:

"You're lovely, but you're empty," he went on. "One couldn't die for you. Of course an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than you altogether, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass. Since she's the one I sheltered behind a screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except for two or three for butterflies). Since's she the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose."

Here's the sculpture that was made out of the loved log:



"Hinoki," by Charles Ray is actually one of my favorite things in the Modern Wing of the Chicago Institute of Art. I've criticized the writings on the wall at the museum. I dread these explanations of art, but I loved Ray's essay, which you can read in full here. The man found and fell in love with a log, but the log was about to rot, so he got big cypress tree and got it carved into a replica of the log:

"With several friends, I transported the tree, cut apart by a chainsaw, back to my Los Angeles studio. Silicone molds were taken and a fiberglass version of the log was reconstructed. This was sent to Osaka, Japan, where master woodworker Yuboku Mukoyoshi and his apprentices carved my vision into reality using Japanese cypress (hinoki).... When I asked Mr. Mukoyoshi about the wood and how it would behave over time, he told me that the wood would be fine for 400 years and then it would go into a crisis; after two hundred years of splitting and cracking, it would go into slow decline for another 400 years. I realized then that the wood, like the original log, had a life of its own, and I was finally able to let my project go and hopefully breathe life into the world that surrounds it."

At the Late Night Notes Café...

... you can always find one more detail to observe and describe.

At the Alienation Nightclub...

... you can walk right by.

At the Reflection Nightclub...

... you can expound ponderous things or chat about glittering superficialities.

Camouflaging myself in a Matisse...

... doing a picture-in-picture Picasso...



... stopping for that train-in-a-fireplace Magritte...



... and getting lost amid the dimly lit glass cases in glass cases in the surrealist passages.



(These are just some more of my pictures from the Art Institute of Chicago. We've moved on to Lafayette, West Lafayette, and back through Chicago, and — almost to Madison — we're picking up free WiFi (and cheap cheeseburgers) at a McDonald's near Beloit.)

I said: "If you meet the Buddha in the museum, stare at him."

And Chip said: "Now look, you get one warning and only one warning. Do NOT stare at the Buddha too long":



I'll just offer some more enchanting raw material, from the south Asian collection at the Art Institute:









ADDED: I didn't intend to refer to my own photographs as "enchanting," but I see — in the middle of the night, with the perspective of insomnia — that it looks like I did. It was the art that I wanted to call enchanting.

"It is all about male genitalia this week."

"Yesterday it was dick. Today it is balls."

Ah! A prod to post the next pic from last night's visit to the Art Institute:

Bundled up.

(At the Renwick Gallery, in Washington.)

Althouse in Washington.

The symposium over, Althouse sits dreamily in an octagonal room at the Renwick Gallery:



Photo by Meade.

One more, also by Meade, with the bust of James Renwick, Jr. (1818-1895) in the background.



***

We're back in Madison now, arriving to homecoming Saturday, after the game has been lost. Too bad for the Badgers, but congratulations to the Boilermakers for beating the Buckeyes! West Lafayette is one of my favorite places on the face of the planet, so I'm very happy for Purdue.

And I'm happy to be back in Madison. I had a nice trip to Washington where George Washington Law School's law review hosted a wonderful symposium on judicial review, and I had a great time hanging out with various conlaw characters. It looked like this:



But that ended, and it was out into the cold rain of our nation's capital to search for my adorable husband, to see some art and eat some food and, today, to fly back into our lovely medium-sized city in the midwest.