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Christina in front of the 9.9 x 6.6 meter canvas ”The Marriage at Cana” by Paolo Caliari, known as Veronese, from 1562-63

Christina in front of the 9.9 x 6.6 meter canvas ”The Marriage at Cana” by Paolo Caliari, known as Veronese, from 1562-63

What a wonderful visual overdose!

Claes Britton | Feb 15, 2006 | 7 comments

When recently honoring Paris with yet another visit, we, for the first time since our early youths, finally took the time for a full day at the mighty Louvre. What a hell of a magnificent monster of a museum that place is! Goddamn! Time still ran short, of course, though we limited ourselves exclusively to painting, seeing the Italian and the Spanish in the morning, then the French, the Dutch, the German and the Flamish in the afternoon. It was something of a visual equivelent, I guess, to starting a meal with pizza and paella for entrées, followed by choucroute and bratwurst with knödel for main course and then a couple of big ol' bowls of french fries with mayonnaise for desert. We still hadn't had enough of it, coming back for seconds two days later, spending another full morning mainly with the jumbo-size, ultra-heroic French Grand Siècle, and then back with the ancient Dutch and Flamish, which has become a personal favorite of ours.

After this so exhaustingly fulfilling and overwhelming experience, it was a much less inspiring exercise, to phrase it very mildly, browsing the fresh spring crop of fashion magazines and checking the shops along Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, also walking through a couple of talked up contemporary exhibitions. Please excuse us, but let's say that our present day's glamour, extravagance and decadence just seems so depressingly stale, stereotype and straight out poor, cheap, dull and ugly in comparison...and we're still being very kind and forgiving at that...

”In the olden days, if you didn´t get it right, you got killed, but now you only risk losing the competition. It´s like everything that´s modernized – it loses quality.”
- Takayoshi Nagamine, Master of the Eight Dan at Shorinryo, Japan´s oldest karate dojo in Naha, Okinawa (from ”Okinawa, mon amour” in Stockholm New No. 11 – the Tokyo issue).

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