Load Of Balls
Oct. 25th, 2025 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo Ballrooms are in the news. Firstly there's the huge vanity project the American President is erecting over the grave of Eleanor Roosevelt. And secondly there's the affair at the British Museum.
The British Museum (which contains very little that is actually British) is a vast warehouse full of Imperial loot. It's new director had the wizard wheeze of inviting 800 of the world's richest, vainest and least self-aware people- many of the identifiably friends of Jeffrey- to come and disport themselves in a peculiar shade of pink among the ruins of the world's great civilisations.
The old East Wing was a serious building in which serious people did serious things. It's replacement is a frivolous building in which frivolous people will do frivolous things. The Museum is also a serious building full of serious things- and not intended to serve as a backdrop against which Mick Jagger and Naomi Campbell might flex their arthritic limbs. Frivolity is a splendid thing, but there's a time and a place.
What caused particular annoyance in the case of the BM's "Pink Ball" was the use of the Duveen Gallery- which houses the marbles from the Parthenon- as a dining room- for the penguin suits and the ladies in pink. Phedias would have been unamused- or simply bemused. Ditto Pericles. Ditto the modern Greeks who want the marbles back and housed in a gallery on the Acropolis where they will be treated as the foundation monuments of modern civilisation that they are.
The T**** Ballroom and The BT's Pink Ball: there is a distinct aroma of fin de siecle/last things/collapse of empire about them both.....
The British Museum (which contains very little that is actually British) is a vast warehouse full of Imperial loot. It's new director had the wizard wheeze of inviting 800 of the world's richest, vainest and least self-aware people- many of the identifiably friends of Jeffrey- to come and disport themselves in a peculiar shade of pink among the ruins of the world's great civilisations.
The old East Wing was a serious building in which serious people did serious things. It's replacement is a frivolous building in which frivolous people will do frivolous things. The Museum is also a serious building full of serious things- and not intended to serve as a backdrop against which Mick Jagger and Naomi Campbell might flex their arthritic limbs. Frivolity is a splendid thing, but there's a time and a place.
What caused particular annoyance in the case of the BM's "Pink Ball" was the use of the Duveen Gallery- which houses the marbles from the Parthenon- as a dining room- for the penguin suits and the ladies in pink. Phedias would have been unamused- or simply bemused. Ditto Pericles. Ditto the modern Greeks who want the marbles back and housed in a gallery on the Acropolis where they will be treated as the foundation monuments of modern civilisation that they are.
The T**** Ballroom and The BT's Pink Ball: there is a distinct aroma of fin de siecle/last things/collapse of empire about them both.....
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Date: 2025-10-25 12:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-25 01:26 pm (UTC)