Me and the missus went to Brussels for the weekend and we did all the usual tourist stuff such as drink Belgian beer in the Grand Place, wander around and look at the art nouveau buildings, and eat moules, chocolate, frites and waffles (although not all at the same time).
We also had a bit of a Herge pilgrimage as the missus is a huge Tintin fan and as this involved going around the comic design museum and several comic shops I was quite happy too.
The highlight for me, though, was the Museum of Ancient and Modern Art. The ‘ancient’ stuff consisted of 14th-century to 18th-century work which was mainly religious paintings or portraits of rich folk. To be fair the Ruebens stuff was very big and very impressive but art designed to inspire religious awe never really floated my boat in the first place. And there was rather a lot of this…
The modern stuff, however, was fabulous with Picasso, Magritte, Dali, Henry Moore, Seurat, Gaugin and chums all on show. There was also a Belgian artist called Marcel Broodthaers who had done a work made entirely of empty mussel shells. Sadly some of these shells had fallen off the work and were lying at the bottom of the case.
I argued that these discarded shells represented the ephemeral nature of art and the artist had intentionally created a work with a limited shelf-life. The missus said it was because the glue he’d used to stick the shells on wasn’t strong enough.
But that’s the great thing about art. It inspires debate…
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