Food for the Soul will now be adding a dedicated mini-site to bring you all the culture stories in one place
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout
The world has just hunkered down to wait out the virus. Everything has ground to a sudden halt: going to work or school, dining out or seeing friends. At the time when we need this most, taking care of our psyche is also going on a break. Going to museums, historical sites and tourist attractions – it all has stopped as well. For me, a museum visit is an antidote to chores, work duties, or the noise of daily news and social media interruptions. I know from walking around museums and historical sites that there are millions of people who feel the same – you go to a museum to do something different than you do every day, to share cultural wonders with your friends, or may be to teach kids about a different world than their school life. Now all this has to be suspended but our souls need feeding more than ever.
Dozens of major museums all over the world have opened their doors virtually by offering digital tours of their collections and even exhibitions. Here is one from the Louvre– perhaps not the way you would choose to wander through long corridors but it gives you a taste of the most venerated of all art museums.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has also filled their current exhibitions section with peeks into presentations that would be available had the museum not been forced to close its doors a few days ago. One of these exhibitions, a retrospective of the German artist Gerhard Richter, was opened at the Met for only nine days before it had to close. It was supposed to travel in the summer to other museums. If it does happen (since we now cannot figure out our lives next month, much less what will happen this summer), we’ll try to cover it for you. Richter is a fascinating contemporary painter.
The MET has just announced a closure till July and it anticipates a $100 million revenue loss. This does not bode well for smaller, less-endowed museums all over the world. Time will tell how many of them will be there for us once we emerge into a tourist mode again.
Since we are all going to spend more time in front of our screens than ever, we are creating a better virtual space for culture stories. We are launching within The Solari Report a dedicated space for Food of the Soul – our exploration of museums, exhibitions, new movies or some interesting streaming offers – all in one place. We want to cover things that are artistically stimulating, let you discover some fun facts about art or artists, suggest potential places to visit when we finally can, or point towards movies and shows that you may have missed. It all comes from my love of art not as an abstract notion of something elitist, but something than can be used to soothe stress or to satisfy an intellectual curiosity. After all, I’m Your Culture Scout – someone who brings some art and movie stories you might enjoy.
Olga Boznańska. Children on a staircase. 1898. Galeria Rogalińska. National Museum in Poznań, Poland. Photo: Public Domain Wikimedia Commons.
We will still premier all the new stories on the home page under Food for the Soul banner, but if you would like to check our older postings, listen to podcasts, or to see some updates in a blog – this dedicated space will serve the purpose. To this end, we are gathered together all the past “Food for the Soul” stories under Column. A new series called Women Artists is a dedicated section to highlight female artists and their interesting biographies. We are also planning podcasts and new thematic series. We’ll find art and culture to soothe our souls wherever we can.
