I freely admit that I was being childish

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon with not much happening. Our flatmates were occupying the lounge room, watching some sort of game show that we couldn’t quite follow in spite of the fact that it was being watched at the maximum possible volume, so we felt the need to be out of the house. The museum here has free entry on Sundays, and it seemed as good a time as any to check it out. The ground floor had an exhibition of amateur photography, some of which was stunning, and some of which was horribly earnest, but the real attractions are the art works and archaeological exhibitions on the higher floors. 

There are some beautiful Roman mosaics and some stonework from the medieval period, which were wonderful. I would have been happy to pay the admission fee just to see the stone carvings;

And there were some nice Roman artefacts; I’m always enthralled by these little everyday objects, far more than I am by massive statues or buildings. 

I always find the idea that someone handled these things every day touching, and somewhat sobering. I wonder if they were treasured items that had been scrimped and saved for as presents to mark a special celebration, or if they were just trinkets that were lost in the mountains of stuff that person possessed.We wandered around these floors for quite a long time, at first trying to read the little Spanish descriptions of the objects, but after a while just enjoying looking at them.

Then we went onto the higher floors where the religious art is shown. I know I’m going to sound like a philistine, but I just found it tedious. I can appreciate that the paintings are old, but basically, they’re pretty rubbish. There. I’ve said it. If an HSC student presented one of these paintings as their final work, they’d get a verdict of ‘must try harder’. I find it hard to enjoy looking that these paintings on any level other than that the colours are quite nice, and that I’m impressed that they’ve survived for so long basically intact.

What I’m trying to make sound less low brow is that I eventually lost interest in pretending that I cared about the art, and I started judging them on my own neanderthal criteria. 

Such as, which statues would work best as models for monsters on Dr. Who?

                                        or

Or, which painting is less homoerotic?

                                        or

I realise that I was being juvenile, and that anyone with any kind of religious sensibility probably doesn't think this is at all funny. 

It was it this point that one of the guards told me off. I didn’t see any signs that prohibited photography, I wasn’t using a flash, and I was being relatively discreet; I wasn’t actually pointing at things and laughing. So I can only assume that he picked up on the fact that I was behaving like a stroppy teenager and making fun of the exhibits from the less than reverent air I had about me. In which case, he gets a gold star for his observational skills. 

I was told in no uncertain terms to put my camera away, or I’d be asked to leave. For a brief moment I considered trying to impress the guard by telling him that I did in fact hold Bachelor of Arts, and had some experience studying art history, and that I was perfectly qualified to point and laugh all I wanted. However,  it occured to me that no one is impressed by a BA, and shame overcame my urge to bluster. I was sufficiently chastened that I spent quite a long time looking appreciatively at some disastrous modern art they had on the top floor in order to look less like a total pleb.