#fromliberty

ohhh my god lib ohhh my god you’re asking a hell of a question

okay so it’s no secret i am here for all history, ancient history mostly but lbr i’ll take any history ever it’s all great who need science and art museums when i can go look at ancient stuffs, stuffs made by people who are dead okay it’s the best thing ever

so like, being v english and v into history my favourite museum ever is the british museum which i wish we could have gone and seen because like i know you’d have loved it next time you come to london we’re going there. 

anyway i’ve been there twice in my life so far and both times with large groups of friends. and the first time was with my classics class and oh my god let me tell you, unleash twelve 15 y/o classical history nerds into that museum and what happens is magical. 

obviously we started in the greek section because our teachers basically chivied us there and looked around and then went lolbye nerds and sat in the little cafe in the centre room. basically everything is very large and super pretty and i’m pretty sure if i went in there alone i’d spend like eight hours looking at literally everything in wonder like your typical bad pretentious YA protag (ft leather satchel and notebook filled with poignant poetry and all) and we basically spent the entire time making either bad history jokes or correcting each other on our badly learned facts it was beautiful and we went for chinese after so no one can complain

and this is irrelevant to the museum bit but like we were walking to china town in london after and we’d entered china town except i can be a bit ditzy and in my own little world and obviously i was contemplating the world of ancient history or w/e and i went to my friend abbey “wow there’s a lot of chinese shops here” and she was like “well done hannah no shit sherlock” (this was back in the days that was a popular phrase obviously)

anyway let me tell you the one thing i absolutely remember adoring beyond belief is the exhibit that we found hardest to get to because for some reason we took like three wrong turns in this museum (which is weird because the museum runs on a pretty basic grid despite being in this old grandiose building in the middle of london a.k.a the most ramshackle batshit confusing place ever) anyway we finally found the exhibit on ancient chinese artefacts, i think there was a japanese exibit too?? i’d have to check but anyway the paintings and pottery and art are still some of the most beautiful things i’ve ever seen and I really want to go back and see them because i love them lots

the museum is actually pretty good for all sorts of cultures you know, beyond your ancient stuff that i get overexcited over. i’m pretty sure they have stuff on native america, european history (eastern too) and some of african history (mostly ancient egypt because what other parts of african history do we actually recognise in the western world?)

okay i rambled on a lot but i really love this museum and i want to show it to everyone it’s really terrible of me and i want to go again some time.

also also there’s a really cool natural history museum and gallery in bristol that i’ve been to a few times and it has the most amazing paintings and is such a comforting quiet place to be when i’m there so there’s that too. and also also also finally, i also really love the national gallery in london everything in there is so beautiful and i’m really terrible and know nothing about art so it’s actually quite a good place to make bad tasteless jokes but you know that’s just me i’m terribe

Because I love explaining to strangers yes, it is a real degree and no, its not just pretentious elitist pondering on the bourgeois I SWEAR.

But actually though, its my one true love. One of my biggest problems entering college was that I wanted to study EVERYTHING. I came in as a film major, but I wanted to be an architect and I love math (though math does not love me), and my English professor parents instilled a love of literature in me that will never fade, and HOT DAMN FUN FACTS ABOUT HISTORY will never not get me excited. The magical thing about art history is that the pieces of my interests fit into place. Sure, art history has a level of here’s an object let’s talk about how hella rad it is. You can’t talk about the Renaissance and not talk about math. Perspective IS math, and so much of art history owes itself to equations and numbers and science. And literature, of the literature. Artists write literature, critics write literature, and they both read literature. An art piece is a text in itself, but its also a window of the stories and symbols that were so powerful at the time. The most obvious example in western art is of course The Bible, but oral history/stories, mythologies, the pulp novels, Dante, Milton, and so much more are in these paintings and sculptures and buildings and whatever medium you can think of. 

My own personal interests really have me take a historical route when I’m researching a piece. I find the theory of iconographic migration fascinating because you watch a symbol move across time, through different contexts, and its up to you to decipher the code. Why this symbol? What does this symbol mean in its original historical context and what does it mean in the later ones? I find history so fascinating, so amazing, so important, and studying art and visual culture allows me to develop that love. What is the avant-garde version of art history? How does Berlin Dada fit into the Weimar Republic? How does Baroque Architecture fit into the Counter Reformation? 

And then perhaps the most important love of my life, architecture. I hit this moment sophomore year, sitting in Into to Physics, where my heart broke. I didn’t understand it. I just didn’t. I worked at it, I called my physics teacher brother-in-law, I went to my professor’s office hours, I tried so hard, but my brain just doesn’t work like that. It was a moment where I realized, I might not be cut out to be an architect. It was the first real time a dream had been crushed for me, and while I was already depressed, it sent me into a spiral that eventually led me to having to take a semester off. But Art History lets me keep that love of architecture. Filippo Brunelleschi was the first person to inspire me to be an architect, and while that dream is no more, I still can study him, put the pieces together, and try to understand what made him so different, so important. My senior thesis, which I start in the spring, will be looking at Borromini, and attempting to challenge how we talk about baroque architecture. So maybe I won’t design buildings (though a part of my heart still wants to, maybe doing urban design or city planning), but I can still wax poetically about it for the rest of my life. 

boner? haha I have no idea

I like your moxie, Frank. 

:P

televisionblues replied to your post “What’s it called when you get flustered but like in a way that’s like...”

the humina-huminas

That's really close. I like that. 

fromliberty replied to your post “What’s it called when you get flustered but like in a way that’s like...”

lovestruck? dumbstruck?? ?!?!?!

you're getting somewhere with the dumbstruck haha, that's a close second. Good thinking. :)

wobbuffette replied to your post “What’s it called when you get flustered but like in a way that’s like...”

i think flustered is the word

Yeahhh, I think flustered might be the word I'm thinking of in actuality. My friend had me thinking there was another that was more succinct but I don't know, to me flustered is the one that gets it across best. 

i mean pale blogs are more about white beauty standards as a whole rather than glorifying individuals so i wouldn't say it's the exact same