Aesthetic dietetics.

This weekend, I was lucky enough to find out that my friend Jill was going to the San Diego Museum of Art for a class assignment. Steph and I were all too happy to tag along. I was stunned by my good fortune; when I was researching things to do for fall break for the center spread I did a couple of weeks ago, I came across these exhibits and longingly wished I could go. But then I did, and it was greater than even my wistful resignation could have devised.



One of the current exhibits featured the work of Eleanor Antin, a professor emeritus of UCSD. She staged these epic scenes of people dressed as Romans and photographed them, creating giant canvases that presented a scathing metaphor of consumer glut and indifferent apathy. They were all taken in San Diego, and I especially loved this one, with the Roman columns foundering on Torrey Pines State Beach.



The museum has a splendid permanent collection of Asian art, Japanese lacquerwork and Chinese scrolls and Buddhist statuary, which, I was delighted to find, were often in poses that we'd do in yoga class. This was actually a really artsy weekend for Steph and me. The night before, we'd gone to La Jolla to get coffee with some friends. We stopped into a couple of galleries as we walked through town and stumbled upon Picassos, Warhols, and Chagalls for sale.





One room was devoted to devotional works, iconography and madonnas and the like. This lamb was brilliant in real life, the center of the halo the tiniest, most precisely luminous dot imaginable.



The other traveling exhibit presented works on paper by women. The stonework on this cathedral was so intricate and arresting. I wish the picture could do it justice.



I loved this art deco painting as well, soft watercolor and lithe linear swooping movement. A lot of the works there, the docent told us excitedly, had never been shown before. The museum acquired them eighty or a hundred years ago, but had had to store them until now.



And they had a Rene Magritte. Magritte is totally random, hyper-realistic, and invariably absurd, which is clearly why he appealed so much to me as a child. Seriously—in fourth grade, I was all about the guy. And that made seeing his stuff in real life that much more satisfying. It was all really satisfying.