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May 29, 2007
Fascinating Stuff
(David - photo by Richard Carter)
In the domain of pleasures, for instance, the longer prepuce often serves as the object of erotic interest and as a signifier of the sexually attractive male, as demonstrated by the following ribald passage from the Lexiphanes of Lucian:
"Surely," I said, "you don't mean that notable Dion, that lusty, low-scrotumed, cuntish, and mastic-chewing youth who masturbates and gropes whenever he sees someone with a large penis [πεωδη] and a long prepuce [ποσθωνα]?"
Lucian is not satirizing the fact that a long prepuce should function as the visual cue that triggers Dion's erotic responses. On the contrary, he is satirizing Dion's general lack of decorum and self-control in the face of such self-evident visual stimulants. The desirability of the long prepuce, hence, remains beyond question.
The eroticization of the prepuce is also evident in the Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes, where the lusty father-in-law, pressing to his face a garment owned and worn by the young and handsome poet Agathon, exclaims: "By Aphrodite, this has a pleasant smell of [a little] prepuce [ποσθη]!" The diminutive posthion (ποσθιον), as opposed to the standard word posthe (ποσθη), is most likely used here as a term of endearment.
-- Frederick M. Hodges, The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome: Male Genital Aesthetics
and Their Relation to Lipodermos, Circumcision, Foreskin Restoration, and the Kynodesme (in the The Bulletin of the History of Medicine)
The most erudite piece I have ever read on such an entertaining subject.
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May 23, 2007
The Queen of England posing for Lucian Freud (photo by David Dawson)
The photo is actually much better than the portrait. I can't help giggling at seeing her majesty wearing this glittery diamond covered crown in the badly lit, dirty and slightly run down corner of the studio. Looks like conceptual art to me. Just think, the power some artists attain. The queen succumbs to the vanity of having her portrait painted by the most famous painter alive
and submits to his conditions. Just one century ago, painters would fight for the honor. That's a lot to think about. But I'm too lazy.
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May 22, 2007
I wanted to write about...
...the centennial of Hergé and how despite being a Tintinophile I am also a contrarian. Hergé used to say that there was no place for sex or women in Tintin's male friendship world. So I started a post on Tintin porn parodies only to realize this site has a fantastic compilation of bootleg Tintin albums from the 80's and Arte channel aired a great documentary called "La vie sexuelle de Tintin". I also found a couple of bloggers or website owners who got sued (and condemned) for promoting "illegal" Tintin album versions. Which made me want to blog about copyright, civil liberties, the moustache on Mona Lisa, the power of dead people's wishes over the creativity of the living and trash Belgian law but I'm too lazy.
(Roy Lichtenstein is allowed to throw a Matisse painting on Tintin's living room)
...Elias Canetti's Auto da Fé and how if were this book edible it would leave a bitter-sweet taste on my mouth. It's a wonderful bizarre and funny novel, a chimera born of crossing Lynch with Ionesco with a german twist. Alas, the version I own seems like someone pasted the results of Babel Fish "German to English" translation into it (my book says the translation was supervised by the author). Here I am holding what could be one of my favorite novels of all times, wondering if this will be the final trigger to upgrade my current tourist babble german language level. Which made me want to blog yet again about the difficulties of translation, the wonder of learning a new language, post an hilarious excerpt of the novel when the main character tries to convince his books to go to war and faces the opposition of buddhist texts and of Schopenhauer who suddenly found the will to live, quote Walter Benjamin, add an excerpt of Saramago's Baltasar & Blimunda and show you how crappy the english translation is but I'm too lazy.
...Gilbert & George's downloadable art and how the open source paradigm should invade every corner of knowledge, cadavres exquis, the recent trends on how art can be an effective political and social integration tool, how weird that most art reviews I read are favorable and hardly ever anyone dares to say that - although Gombrich says there is no such thing as a bad work of art - that red canvas with a bit of newspaper glued to it brings nothing new and is a lame attempt at originality, the New Yorker article on Banksy and how even the most wannabe rebels give in to money and vanity despite maintaining their anonymity, the Hopper exhibition at the MFA in Boston, the underrated value of art in the developing world and Maslow's hierarchy of needs but I'm too lazy.
...my plans for the second semester of 2007, Cavafy's poems, Socrates' "know thyself", healthy doubts, status quo, Ecclesiastes, Ovid on fishing, missing oneself, the Bloomsbury group, low cost airlines, auction houses, journalism, aging, optimism, adventure, excitement and romance but that would be too personal.
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May 01, 2007
Ole Worm's Cabinet of Curiosities
" a goodly, huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included." -- Francis Bacon on the ideal Cabinet of Curiosities.
****
I'm compiling a list of museums or collections which first started as Cabinets of Curiosities or Wunderkmmern for my own future travel reference.
KunstKamera in San Petersburg, Russia - Today, collections of Peter the Great’s Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkammer) are among the most complete and interesting in the world. (includes anatomical specimens made by the famous Dutch anatomist Frederick Ruysch)
Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milano, Italia - houses the collection of Manfredo Settala, also known as the milanese Archimedes.
Ambras Castle, Innsbruck, Austria - houses the only surviving collection of the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand II.
Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala, Sweden - The Augsburg art cabinet, the best preserved of the Kunstschränke made by Philipp Hainhofer, which was given to Gustavus Adolphus in 1632 by the City of Augsburg, is on display in the Gustavianum.
The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK - The collection presented to the University of Oxford by Elias Ashmole (1617–92) was in origin already half a century old by this time, having been founded by John Tradescant (d.1638) and displayed to the public (for a fee), first by him and later by his son John (1608–62) in their dwelling house at Lambeth, widely known as 'The Ark'. The contents were universal in scope, with man-made and natural specimens from every corner of the known world.
Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, La Rochelle, France - houses the cabinet de curiosité Lafaille
*****
Frederick Ruysch's Anatomical Curiosities
*****
More info on Cabinets of Curiosities:
Peter Huber's excellent site (in german) on wunderkammern, featuring a list of museums mostly in germany.
Cabinets de Curiosités (french), interesting site by a canadian phd student including his reading notes on selected bibliography.
A lecture on Museums and their functions, featuring slides with engravings depicting famous cabinets of curiosities.
A bibliography by the University of California.
The King's Kunstkammer is an Internet exhibition, which is a partial reconstruction of the Royal Danish Kunstkammer which was established by King Frederik III in the mid-1600s - a collection which was broken up some 200 years later when all the pieces it contained were distributed among newly created specialist museums.
Curiositas (in french) has an extensive research on cabinets of curiosities based, as far as I can see, on Pierre Borel's inventory "Roole des principaux cabinets curieux, et autres choses remarquables qui se voyent ez principales Villes de l'Europe" or Huguetan's.
An article from Cabinet magazine. Very appropriate.
*****
Stephan Zick, Anatomical teaching model of a pregnant woman
Nuremberg, around 1680
(seen on Georg Laue's Kunstkammer)
*****
And from the New World, a cabinet of curiosities in itself:
The Wachsach Museum of Oddities and its shrunken heads and feejee mermaids;
The Museum of Jurassic Techonology which houses, for example, an exhibition about the dogs of the soviet space program;
P.T. Barnum's Museum turned Circus;
The National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington featuring, among other attractions, the stomach of the compulsive hair eating girl;
And my personal favorite, Ripley's Believe it or Not, a man's quest for oddities turned into a museum chain and turist trap.
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