Sharing

As I said in a previous post, being alone has certain benefits (along of course with certain drawbacks). I am always free to do what I want when I want and I am forced to spend a lot of time in my head, thinking about how I feel about what is going on around me. On the other hand, being able to share your thoughts and experiences with someone else can be really great too.

Andrew is here. Another Harvard grad, he is spending this year traveling, in a more fly-with-the-wind, everything-in-his-backpack kind of way. He's in Paris for a few days. We spent the day at museums - the Picasso museum and the Louvre. Andrew is a particularly good person with whom to 'share' thoughts about art because we both took an intro art history course this past Spring at Harvard. This allows us to talk about the art from similar backgrounds, bringing up other works of art, historical facts, or criticisms of the interpretations provided to us in readings or by professors.

The morning at the Picasso Museum was interesting. He certainly was incredibly talented and had some interesting ideas about art. However, he is not my favourite. His more extreme cubist work makes me feel - well - stupid. I have so much trouble figuring out what is going on and why those three random shapes represent a guitar that I end up feeling confused and unhappy rather than artistically challenged or fulfilled. Maybe that makes me uncultured, but give me Monet, Degas, J.L. David, Delacroix, or any of the others any day over cubism. Art is, after all, subjective.