all artistic-like
This weekend, I went to The Corcoran to see an exhibit called "Beyond the Frame: Impressionism Revisited." A sculptor named J. Seward Johnson has basically taken a bunch of famous paintings and made them three-dimensional -- life-sized statues, hills full of fake grass and poppies, fully decorated rooms that you could step into and around.

There's something sort of trivializing and naughty-feeling (trying and failing to resist the liberal-arts pull of the word "transgressive," but at least I wrestled it inside the parentheses) about the whole exhibit. It was packed, and there were kids all over the place, touching the statues, climbing on everything. And the thing was that the exhibits didn't really create a feeling of anything the way that looking at -- or into -- a painting does. You'd think it would draw you in more, but it didn't, really.

That said, it was pretty cool. Johnson's statues are actually amazingly cool and not trivial at all. There was a lot of playful self-referencing in the exhibits, too, that showed a different level of awareness of the project. But I don't know, maybe I'm too snobby, but it didn't really have any kind of emotional impact at all.

Intellectually: cool. Practically: not so much. Except maybe the Van Gogh bedroom. My roommate had to drag me out of that one, which was, in fact, rather incredible. It sort of made you feel like you weren't really standing on the ground.