Unemployment Diary: The good grey guardians of art

The good grey guardians of art
Patrol the halls on spongy shoes,
Impartially protective, though
Perhaps suspicious of Toulouse.

Museum Piece by Richard Wilbur

March 4, 2009

I will not sit at home, idly searching for jobs or waiting for calls. That way lies madness, or at least grinding ennui.

Instead, I’m planning to take advantage of my new-found wealth in time to go to some places I seldom get to when I’m at work. My first outing was to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, a first-rate museum packed with portraits, landscapes, an amazing collection of Chinese artifacts, and some very nice photographs (a Julia Margaret Cameron and an Edward Weston were in the rotating exhibit today, as well as a nice big gallery of Tom Arndt’s street photography from Home: Tom Arndt’s Minnesota).

Roaming the galleries, FED3 loaded with film (alas, 100 Arista.EDU, a bit slower than I would have planned for this outing, had I been allowed to plan), made for a relaxing afternoon. I found the sculptures–the big Buddhas, the Roman heads, the cool marble–especially soothing. Ganymede patiently serves the eagle, forever frozen in the moment before he is swept up to Olympus by the notoriously shape-shifting and love-lorn Zeus.

It wasn’t until I was on my way home, listening to the radio, that I learned that the MIA was performing its own round of layoffs, eliminating 6% of its staff. Sad as it is to have been cast out of the comfort of my programming job, it would be a fate worse than any the Greeks could dream up to be expelled from those lovely galleries. The eternal marbles feel a little less static now.