Part III of Travels: Museums

I promise I'm getting to the coolest part of my travels (at least blogwise) Japan soon, but I'm doing things chrnologically so here's some more London. I absolutely LOVE going to museums and London has some of the best of them.

The Victoria and Albert Museum is a wonderful museum that is pretty unique. It has sculptures and paintings like all muesums but it also has a lot of textiles and different exhibits about objects used in everyday life. The V and A is actually where the Kylie Minogue clothing exhibit is, it was sold out though. It also does not focus on eastern or western culture, it has everything from Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Middle Eastern items to English, French and European items. Apparently it has one of the largest collections of Indian art outside of India. The museum is HUGE, miles long apparently so there's so much to see. They were having an exhibit on fashion when I was there and here are some of the highlights.

They have an exhibit on the clothing which i just had to share. Here is a part of the exhibit on the history of dresses. I really like the last 2, they're so pretty.


Yes, a Juicy sweatsuit is in a museum. A pink one of of course.


This is a dress made out of 20some bras which is pretty cool. When I first saw it I couldn't even tell what it was made out of. I like the dress to the right of it too.


They had a special exhibit on '60s clothing which was pretty cool.


Of course fashion of the '60s is not complete without hats!


The Tate Modern is one of the coolest museums I've ever been to. Instead of the regular old audio guides you get a mini computer (for only 1 pound, 2 US dollars) which totally made the musuem tour for me. For each piece it features it tells you different things. In this Miro painting it circles certain aspets of it and explains them.


The computer will also show pictures of other works that artist was inspired by, historial photos and other things, like this lobster phone thing by Dali and other artistic things that were part of the surrealist movement.


It even has some artistic games you can play, there was a create your own surrealist painting one.

Right now the Tate has this artistic installation by Carsten Höller that are giant slides which are really fun (and free). They start at every floor, all the way to the 5th floor. All the tickets for the high ones were sold out though so I did the lower ones which was awesome. You can even watch live webcam video of people sliding down.


From the Tate's website:

For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a 'voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind'. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don't have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the 'inner spectacle' experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.

To date Höller has installed six smaller slides in other galleries and museums, but the cavernous space of the Turbine Hall offers a unique setting in which to extend his vision. Yet, as the title implies, he sees it as a prototype for an even larger enterprise, in which slides could be introduced across London, or indeed, in any city. How might a daily dose of sliding affect the way we perceive the world? Can slides become part of our experiential and architectural life?