I value your description because it’s honest. To describe the Prado without it would be masking your experience. Why is it so hard for people to accept that intellectuals live in the same world as the rest of us, and that they too have surface-level reactions?

I hope you’ll find out one day that objectification in and of itself does not equal art.

I have in the past accepted that all art is political, but then I left college.

Your comparison of how male workers are treated compared to female workers are valid.

However, this piece has nothing to do with that. Do I ever for a moment compare any of the guards to the male guards there? You can’t just introduce a social commentary into a passage which doesn’t receive it. That’s not even good deconstruction.

I am not going to accept this being “called out” foolishness. I described what I saw. This is not a political piece. Its not social commentary. Its not an op-ed. I am not asserting facts. I am not particularly concerned with what you think about such pieces — and even less so when you impose socio-political maquillage upon it. I have never accepted the entire bs about: all art is political, nor will I.

“… rather divide us …”

should read,

“… rather THAN divide us …”.

Why would such women be “out of place”? As a previous commenter said, museums are meant to bring us together, rather divide us between the “beautiful” and the “not-beautiful.”

As the same commenter noted (I think), these elderly women guards would not have seemed “out of place” to the Renaissance painters whom Ali Eteraz calls attention to. Death and decay were not horrifying abstractions to artists in the past. Until the second half of the 19th century, in the developed world, even young people of the privileged classes lived very precarious lives, surviving mostly on luck and their native immune systems. Thus Ali’s favored artists, in paying minute attention to the realities of skin, muscle, and bone even in idealized portraits, were not ‘rebelling against ugliness’ but insisting on the importance of human physicality itself despite its precariousness (or perhaps because of its precariousness). If such such artists were rebelling against anything, it was against the abstraction from human physicality that is typical of earlier medieval art and sculpture, especially for religious subjects. Such artists were not necessarily less devout than their medieval predecessors, nor were they necessarily making ironic comments about Christian belief (although they might have been); rather, they are insisting that, for example, the Virgin Mary is not only the Mother of God but also a physical human being with all that her physicality entails, and that human physicality and participation in eternity are not necessarily mutually exclusive, at least not at all times. Unlike their medieval predecessors and also some folks today, Renaissance artists were not schizoid about human physicality. They and their patrons, and, I think, their Christian contemporaries, did not feel annihilated by human fraility. That’s why such painters would not have found the elderly women guards “out of place,” and
that’s what I think Ali Eteraz misses in his comments both about the paintings and about the elderly women guards.

I realize my above paragraphs have mostly re-emphasized the remarks of a previous commenter, but I wanted to get that out there. I hope it hasn’t been out of place.

Because to the mortals, God is dead.

You just don’t get it.

Ali, the hullabaloo is that you wrote an ageist and sexist piece. People are calling you on it.

No. It is not an ageist and sexist piece. It is a very good piece about describing women guards as they were – out of place in a place where beauty is displayed.

It is describing things as they exist. Guards in Prado are old women. They are not good looking. Some of them are unfortunately not even graceful. They do just sit and rock on chairs. Some of them are very polite, and yes, if you stopped and talked to them could tell you the stories that may be more interesting on the beauty on the wall or the young. These are all facts. These are not ageist or sexist comments.

My question is why is Ali required to dress up facts and his thoughts so that he can be politically correct. He is not.

Sure, talking to the people who are serving you, whether they’re guards in a museum or clerks in a grocery store, as if they’re human beings and not just automatons doing a job, that can also be a good thing. But, you know something? If I’m dealing with someone at work, say a phone caller back when I was working tech support, and all that person wants is my job skills, that’s OK; I can take satisfaction in doing the job well, and know that when I’m off the job I’m known for other things than my job skills. If I’m “honey” or “sweetie” on the job when young, and an offense to someone’s eyes when old, there’s no place I get to go to be off duty from that.