Paris, July 2017

I had heard about the Christian Dior exhibition at the Musée des Art Décoratifs that would be happening when I was in Paris. It was a retrospective celebration of Dior’s 70th birthday. I wanted to see it more than anything else when I was there in the summer of 2017.

By the time I went I had been in Paris a while. I knew what I was doing. Line up before the museum opens. Those Frenchies take their art and culture seriously.

In the six months this exhibition ran, 700,000 people attended. 

It was a day in heaven. 

Those Frenchies know how to put an exhibit together. They also know how to behave in a museum, and this one was particularly crowded.

Talk quietly.

Move softly and quickly.

Take your turn looking, then step out of the way. 

Do not forget you are surrounded by people. 

This is public event, this is not your opportunity to claim territory.

Share.

You can be in a crowd and respect the private experience of others.

Merci, Frenchies.

I often put in my ear plugs in a museum in America. Anglos prefer to stand in front of piece of art and a tell a stupid, boring, irrelevant story about their life at extra loud volume while blocking the art. We like to smile super big, too. It is tedious being American.

Mr. Pennington and I visited the Book of Kells in Dublin (please do before you die, it was incredible).

A very large American man stood in front of one of the exhibits, his back turned to it, pontificating loudly (with pointless musings) to his buddy. I asked him to please move out of the way if he was not going to look at the book. He looked at me angrily. He talked louder, refused to move and wasted even more of everyone’s time. It was a very, very crowded exhibit, which made it a stressful place to be, but he was going to assert his dominance over all of it and all of us. Good for him. 🙄

Back to the Dior exhibit in Paris, where the crowd moved like a well-organized, quiet stream with no elbowing or bad manners, so everyone could enjoy...

My pics do not accurately capture how enormous this exhibition was.

I was there for hours, swept away.

That was a great day in my life.