September 21. We took our time getting ready to go out today and met the Freedom’s at 1100 hours.

We went over to the Smithsonian’s information building. We had to stop in because the building is so good looking and we wanted to venture inside. It is the original museum and its just beautiful inside.

Next up was a return trip to the National Art Gallery for a guided tour dealing with sculpture. Again the tour was great. After the tour we wandered a bit before having lunch and then we headed over to the Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art.

Modern art is a pretty broad term. It seems that you can hang anything on the wall and call it art. We saw pieces ranging from unimaginative tripe to thought provoking pieces that were just brilliant. There was actually a 3 foot by 6 foot framed canvas that was just flat black, nothing else and yet there it is hanging on a museum wall in Washington, D.C. What 2 eggheads got together and deemed this piece of crap worthy of a wall of its own. Yet again we took a guided tour after spending twenty minutes on our own wondering what the hell we were looking at.

These randomly scattered chairs inside a box were actually an exhibit.



There were sculptures, welded pieces, works in wood and of course paint. Like I said some of it was nicely done by obviously talented individuals. Some of it was completely boring crap. There was a rolled up car fender complete with undercoating on a pedestal. A torn and folded piece of metal that’s been on display for sixty years. The guide asked my impression and I told her I thought that it should have been recycled. Everyone in our group snickered quietly but I think she was crushed; she didn’t ask me anything else.

There was one American artist, Morris who had only sold one work in his lifetime. After his death over 600 completed canvases were discovered in his home. The museum is “fortunate” to have over twenty of them in a series of display rooms. They’re all the size of a king sized bed or larger. They all are very similar in style. They look as if someone took a fist full of crayons and dragged them across a sheet of paper. What you have is several parallel lines of differing colors. Kinda rainbowish.

After washing the colors to blend the edges of the color, that’s it, he’s done. The guide was beside herself with glee as we proceeded from one room to the next……oooh, look here he works from left to right. Oh my, here he starts to use curved lines………and oh look there’s horizontal. Christ, I was pretty sure that some of them weren’t even hung right side up. Hell, there was one piece that was twenty feet long with a few stripes painted vertically at either end with the middle fourteen feet of canvas being left untouched. Did he die while he was working on that one? Jesus what crap.

After the tour of the Hirschhorn we stopped in for some Thai food at Jenny’s Asian Fusion restaurant. The food and service were really great and it’s a very short walk to the yacht club where we stopped in for a quick night cap before heading back out to the boats for the night.