Tuesday, January 19, 2021

I didn't see the Frida Kahlo show at the De Young

I went to the de Young Museum, but it was closed to the general public because of the pandemic. I went to go pick up my painting from the prematurely closed art exhibition made up of local artists' work.  And so I got my painting, took a photo of it with Frida Kahlo's image on a window and left.



 

While my art was up in the museum, I went there on three different occasions:  alone, with a friend, and with my pandemic bubble.

 

I never saw the concurrent Frida Kahlo exhibit, but I did see some exhibit about artificial intelligence. But I didn't get it.  I didn't get the point of it.  I frequently feel that tech engineers and programmers and that ilk like to slap each other on the back, flatter each other or themselves, and I felt that there was a bit of that in this exhibit.  It's probably because I'm anti-intellectual and willfully ignorant and maybe even unwillfully ignorant that I didn't feel compelled to understand it.  I'd like to talk to an interesting, not boring, person who liked this exhibit, the artificial intelligence exhibit.  I want to know why this was in the museum, what the point of it was.

 

I feel funny, or I feel that it's funny how I didn't ever go into the Frida Kahlo exhibit.  I might have been able to get into it for free on the day I had an artist's pass for the museum because I had a work on display there, but there was a line to get in, and for some reason, I'm not completely and utterly riveted by the story of Frida Kahlo.  I like her, but as with so many things, I'm a bit blasé about her, at least compared to people who seem to love her.  My level of love is at about 7 or 8, and that's based on I don't know what,  the stuff of hers I've seen and what I know about her struggles in her life. I don't really like art that much anyhow.



Even though the museum is closed, you can still look at it from the outside. It is over 20 feet tall and has a tower that looks like a triangle. Pretty much the whole thing is covered in a metal mesh that looks weathered and makes me think of decaying ships wrecked on Normandy beaches in World War 2.


I didn't run my fingers along the mesh, but I should have. I just kind of looked at it and wondered why they put it over the building. I'm not sure it offers any functional advantages, but maybe it provides shade to offices in it by diffusing the light in which case the mesh functions like tree leaves, so that's pretty neat.


There's a sculpture garden on one side of it, and it's pretty nifty actually because the natural surroundings of the sculptures is pretty or whatever adjective you wish to use to describe gardens, alive. The sculptures are all dead, but they are in a living garden.