Exhibits and the 40s

Thursday, 12/9, I had another early start to my day. I did some errands before class and after class I went to the Galerie Rudolfinum to see the 'Decadence Now! Visions of Excess' exhibit. Curated by Otto Urban, a NYU in Prague professor, I was initially curious about the exhibit because of countless field trips and I'd heard of made over to the gallery. It didn't hurt that I needed to write a short paper for my English class on a Eastern European cultural event that I'd attended. Nothing like the last day of class to tackle that assignment, right?

Decadence Now! is organized into 5 categories: Pain, Pop, Sex, Madness and Death. Some parts were definitely graphic and gory. Others were slight more light-hearted, but in general the exhibit was definitely different than any I'd ever seen before.

Gallery director Petr Nedoma says, “It’s the other way around: it is what they reveal – not the works themselves – that are shocking. You can accuse some artists of intentionally setting out to shock. But in this exhibition we deliberately avoided such work. If you look at what’s on view, compared to the portion of violence, blood, and helplessness which we see every day on the TV news, this show is a walk in the park. These works reflect what already exists, rather than deliberately setting out to shock.”

Galerie Rudolfinum

With a bit of downtime in Machova I later headed out again, this time back to the NYU center. The photo class was having an exhibition of their final projects, and a few of my friends were in that class. After checking out the exhibit, we went to Jam Cafe, where there was another RA event. The theme was 40's Retro Night.  We saw a jazz pop band called Chamber Worcester and Megaphone. I bowed out before getting a chance to see the performance of swing and step dancing, but it was still nice to experience a local Czech hang out place.

 Listening to music at Jam Cafe

I only have 7 days left here.