Today was a great day.
It started out with a tour of the National Museum of Scotland (I've spent a lot of time there this week) called "Icons of Celticity" which used objects in the museum collections to question the idea of a "celtic people," highlighting the cultural influences from Europe, Rome and Scandanavia on British Isles culture of the time, and the appropriation of culture, symbols and artistic forms that was going on. So, it seems that the groups of peoples known as celts to the Romans were the original hipsters, liberally borrowing from all the cultures that they came into contact with and integrating it into and with their existing identity, in ways that the people of the culture that it was borrowed from may not necessarily recognize, which was really interesting to me. I like how the museum is set up to explore intercultural connections of the time, and to help us to understand that a lot of how we see "the celts" is influenced by Roman literature and artistic stereotypes.
Then I sliced my thumb open on the drill press and scared our studio tech by fainting in her office (Sorry!)... I object to my body being so dramatic.
After that, with my thumb bandaged beautifully by our local first aider (Thanks!) I went to Nathan Cooley's artist talk, back at Minto House. I've spent quite a bit of time in Minto House this week. He talked about the role of the artist as someone "who doesn't tell the truth" which I thought was interesting, that he didn't at first describe it as lying, just not truth telling.
