From: rudi scholl
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 11 April 2002
For a pound or less you enter this large museum. Do not eat the Greek salad in the cafe with the insistent manager or you may be unpleasantly surprised, although the place does have a pleasant beige 70s ambience and beautiful large windows. When we look at these museums filled with the efforts of nation unblessed by genius in the plastic arts, room upon room of dead paintings imitating the styles we think of as going to create the history of western art, we can draw certain contradictory conclusions. One: there really is a difference between good and bad art. Bad art is without any effect or meaning, and makes one doubt that art exists. Two: if we are unfamiliar with a nation's artists we assume they are bad. good art is merely the recogniton of a famous name. Art is a collective fantasy without objectivity, another example of cultural imperialism, history is our story. Three: Hungarian painting is goulash. Four: maybe what we are seeing is good, we must look and think harder.
The wood carvings/altar pieces/paintings, from the renaissance and earlier are exceptional though, noone looks at them in this funny empty museum. We see in them the ugly crazy religious profane world of another age: strange bony feet, pictorial playfulness, graphic miracles, plain faces, and regions underrepresented in the louvre/national/met.
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