When you go the Little Museum of Dublin, as you should, you’ll book a tour time for the main rooms–give yourself some time before or after to explore the other rooms, though.

The Little Museum, situated in a Georgian house, has over 5000 artifacts of city life donated to the museum by Dubliners. The 30-minute tour gives visitors an overview of some of the more important ones, tied to important incidents in Dublin’s history. The other artifacts are stacked around the museum, so peek into every case and every corner.

A few of the rooms are themed–there’s a U2 room, an Irish Times room, and a room devoted to Alfie Bryne, Lord Mayor and Shaking Hand of Dublin.

Visiting Sally Lunn‘s is a must on a trip to Bath. The restaurant is in one of of the oldest buildings in London. Sally Lunn, an immigrant to England, worked and lived there in the 1600s. She made a famous bun, which became the base for sweet and savory dishes. The legend is that her recipe was found in the wall years later and that it is passed down with the lease to each new owner.

I made sure I was hungry when I went–I definitely wanted to try the bun. For 17.58, I got a chicken and ham trencher plate, a pot of the incredible house tea, and a big slice of apple cake. I hadn’t had a trencher before. Here, half a bun is used as the base for a stew–this is how it was done in the old days, before plates were common and cheap. (They still put a plate under their bread plate, though.)

If you get something to eat or drink, you are allowed into the museum. That word is pretty strong, considering I’m about to show you everything in two pictures.

Before leaving, I bought a bun (for about two British pounds) and took it with me to Oxford. It happily gave me breakfast for my first two mornings there.

I usually love exhibitions at the V&A in London, so I headed there my first morning in London a couple of weeks ago.

I’ve participated in food studies conferences and presented on food for the campus book project, so I was interested in what they were going to do.

I was unprepared to walk into a room with curtains the colors of what a healthy intestine might be imagined to look like and a toilet.

They were starting with refuse and recycling. But the exhibit was sparse–I would have loved to know how other cultures and times have recycled, how that word has changed meanings and politics over time, etc. There was none of that.

A little bit on, there was a display about chickens, which didn’t say much about chickens except for that there were different kinds.

There was a film playing about foragers in London and a sampling of foraged juice.

And a table set with objects without too much context.

My favorite:

The best part was the wallpaper in the beginning and the end.

All in all, FOOD left me hungry for a lot more.

So I went to one of my favorite Indian places, Dishoom, for lamb samosas and okra.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a city wherein a famous author has lived, must be in want of a museum.

I dropped in to the Jane Austen Centre earlier this week in the morning. While we waited for the tour to start, we watched a video on a loop. Having to wait made me think the tour would be more tour-ish. Instead, we were in one room for a while while Jane’s family life was explained entertainingly and then in another room to look at a few verified portraits of Jane and a few pictures that might be her. Then we were on our own.

Although Austen is a writer, the museum was a lot heavier in terms of reading than I wanted. That is, her history was on the walls, but it might as well have been in a book or on a website. I like it more when there’s a lot to look at and then the reading complements it.

One of my favorite things was a painting done of Jane by a police artist, Melissa Dring–using the descriptions of her by people who knew her.

I got my picture with Jane.

And with Darcy.

And since I hadn’t had breakfast, I had a savory tea in the beautiful upper-floor teahouse.

A few of you know this already: Karlissa (Melissa Bender and Karma Waltonen) put a book proposal out in the world earlier this year to write a quirky little book about museums.

We will discuss, among other things, our obsession with gift shops, heists, controversies, carrying post-it notes to fix mistakes, and an elf penis we saw in Iceland.

Fingers crossed!

• 

Papers given: 1

Excellent papers heard: 5

Panelists on my animation panel who seemed genuinely surprised that adult cartoons are not just stupid shows for children (and who thus didn’t seem to understand the rhetorical situation of their own presentation): 2

Friends from grad school seen: 5

Times I’ve gotten to see Vanessa this year: 3

Amazing blueberry steak at Acqua al 2: 1

Unnecessary and dangerous staircases in the airbnb: 2

Times I fell: 1

Places on my body I hit when I fell: 4

Giant dark bruises that are bigger and purple-r every day, so dark I’ve googled “when do I see a doctor about a bruise”: 1

Best crabcakes ever (The Old Ebbitt Grill): 1

Glasses of a dry rose while eating the best crabcake ever: 3

Glasses of dry rose I was charged for after eating the best crabcake ever: 1

Best fried yucca ever (at the same restaurant, on two different nights): 2

Times Melissa, Margaret, and I were called “gentlemen” while having the best fried yucca ever: 11

Adorable Peruvian waiters who took great pleasure in serving us gentlemen the best yucca ever and pisco sours he made himself: 1

Grouper servings: 3!

(for context, average grouper servings per year: sadly, 0)

Barry episodes watched with Melissa: 5

Lesbian bars that wouldn’t let Melissa’s bag in and thus that we didn’t go to: 1

Lesbian bars that didn’t have ridiculous bag rules: 1

Games of knock-off Jenga that I didn’t lose: 1

Monuments visited: 2

Museums visited: 3

Museums visited just for the sake of having a great lunch (bison!), though: 1

Grammar problems I saw in Smith-fucking-sonian museum placards: 4

“Stellar” Sea Cow skeletons observed: 1

By definition, unstellar sea cow skeletons observed: 1

Exhibits that accidentally look like threesomes: 1

Restaurants/bars where we were the only white people: 2

Books the McFarland table at the conference had by me: 1 (of 2)

References to Bill Cosby and Michael Jackson at the National Museum of African American History and Culture that made me uncomfortable: 3

Exhibits that downplayed Clarence Thomas’s assholery: 1

Exhibits of Emmett Till’s coffin, which made me cry: 1

Placards explaining that the turpentine camps of Florida were awful: 1

Discussions in which I had to explain to Margaret that Florbama has so much of the coastline that Alabama probably wants because the Spanish weren’t gonna give up those white sand beaches: 1

Maps at the museum proving my point: 1

Months until Melissa’s baby is born: 1.5

Conferences that Karlissa gets to attend this year: 1

Conferences in our future: many, many more

In our last post, we talked about the most famous museum heist in history–the theft of The Mona Lisa.

This week, we’re happy to report that a pair of Judy Garland’s ruby slippers have been found, after being stolen from a museum thirteen years ago.

We don’t know much more than that–the investigation is ongoing. You can read the BBC story about it here.

The Mona Lisa theft made the painting famous–Garland’s ruby slippers don’t need this kind of help–they are already the most valuable film prop in history.

 

Ever wonder why the Mona Lisa is such a big deal?

Sure there’s her enigmatic smile, and the mystery surrounding the identity of the model, and the oddly fantastical landscape in the background. And, yes, she was painted by one of art history’s darling geniuses, Leonardo Da Vinci, who was also a self-taught engineer, master procrastinator, and persecuted bisexual–for all of which we love him even more.

But though Mona Lisa (who also goes by the name La Gioconda) was born in the 16th century and has been on display in the Louvre since its opening shortly after the 18th century French Revolution, she was well-known primarily among the French art intelligentsia until the early 20th century.

On today’s date, August 21, in 1911, Mona Lisa went missing, but her absence wasn’t noticed for 28 hours.  At first, museum staff assumed she’d just been misplaced. Imagine losing track of the Mona Lisa today!

In a short bit of time after the theft was announced, Mona Lisa became a worldwide celebrity. Her photo splashed newspapers around the globe and one New York Times reporter remarked that the theft had caused “such a sensation that Parisians for the time have forgotten the rumors of war.”^[1] (Pre-World War I tensions between France and Germany, had already become heated at the time.)

Two years passed before authorities recovered the painting, during which time newspaper readers everywhere followed the efforts to track her down.

The Mona Lisa had been lifted off the wall, removed from her frame, covered in a blanket, and carried out of the museum by three Italian immigrant workmen at the Louvre. As it goes with immigrant groups everywhere, Italians were much maligned and exploited in early-20th century France. It’s possible that the three thieves were simply trying to take down the master’s house, or that they thought they could profit from selling the painting on the black market, or that, as ringleader Vicenzo Perugia claimed, they were on a patriotic mission.

When he was arrested for the heist, Perugia said that he was simply trying to return a painting that Napoleon had looted from Italy to its proper home. If he sincerely believed this, he was mistaken. Da Vinci himself had given the painting to King Francis 1 during a time when the painter was living in exile in France.

During the two years that Mona Lisa was in Perugia’s possession, she lived in the false bottom of a trunk in the thief’s tiny apartment. Today she hangs behind bullet-proof glass on a wall in the Louvre, and it’s hard to get anywhere near her. You’ll have to elbow your way through all of the other adoring fans to get 2 seconds with her and snap a selfie that will likely turn out bad because of her bullet-proof enclosure.

You can thank Perugia for the fact that you know about the Mona Lisa and for your lousy selfie.

Mona Lisa is highest valued painting in the world, estimated at $782 million in 2015, and the Louvre is the most visited art museum in the world, receiving over 8 million visitors in 2017. Many of those visitors come just to see the Mona Lisa, which is good for her and not so good for many of the other artworks in the museum. Just across the gallery from Da Vinci’s painting hangs Veronese’s masterpiece, Wedding at Cana, which most visitors rush by without a glance in their haste to get a glimpse of that famous smile.

If you’d like to know more, listen to art historian Lorraine Kypiotis discuss the theft on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Or, for an amusing take on the incident, watch Season 5, Episode 9 of Drunk History. They don’t get all of the historical details right, but watching Jack Black play Perugia is priceless.

 

 

 

 

^[1] “‘La Gioconda’ Is Stolen in Paris” Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES.

New York Times (1857-1922); Aug 23, 1911.

This American Life has a fantastic story out this week about “The Feather Heist“–a flute player broke into the British Museum and took millions of dollars worth of not pinin’, but passed on, no more, ceased to be, expired and gone to meet their makers, stiff, bereft of life, resting in peace, pushing up the daisies, metabolic processes stopped, off the twig, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain, joined the choir invisible, ex-birds!