Where do you get collection affliction?

I think it's hard wired into your DNA and there's nothing you can do except monitor your own behavior and continually update your collection, of course. Of course! One of the real benefits of Collection Affliction is an overall abiding affection for museums, because of course, they house....collections. You know it. So museums it is for me. I have to say I like 'em all, regardless of size, location or curation. I LOVE museums. For instance, I love the Museum of the Rockies on Round Butte Road outside of Ronan, Montana. Killer farming equipment collection. Stunning, in fact. Then there's the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Freaking phenomenal building housing martime and whaling artifacts and antiques. Splendid.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County with the dinosauer exhibit is my first recollection of a museum. I loves it still. Deep in my heart. I love the face jars at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum in London. In Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum is an exquisite afternoon (this woman like me, had serious collection affliction) and the Maryhill Museum on the Columbia River Gorge is an absolute do not miss. Blue Boy's there. The High Museum in Atlanta for folk art and the Warhols at the Hirschborn in the D of C are two sterling museum experiences. The Art Institute of Chicago for the pointillist oils is,well, barely describable it's so magnificent. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is where the foremost collection of Pennsylvania Dutch folk art is held. It, too, is magnificent.

The University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology has the world's best collection of totems and dug out canoes. Unbelieveable these things are. And they let you walk among their storage racks. I have a very soft spot in my heart for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the planetarium there and the massive hall off the front door as well as the Museum of the City of New York down the street on Central Park West. The Bishop Museum in Honolulu has many of the Hawai'ian Royal Family possessions with the feathers still intact and absolutely fascinating pen and ink drawings of religious ceremonies the natives observed.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's collection of eye glasses and hair haunts me still although I saw it fully 15 years ago. Musee d'Orsay in Paris is a rehabbed train station and is brilliant with light, the Louvre in Paris held one of my favorite all time exhibits, the Hermes handbag exhibit; one must not neglect the Galleria dell'Accadamia in Florence of course for Davide, The Uffizi in Florence for so many incredible, beautiful things including the da Vinci exhibit and Botticelli, oh and my favorite, the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. The Vatican Museum in Rome has a marvelous collection of maps and one of my very favorite museums, in Florence again, the Museo de Storia della Scienza has a exquisite collection of world globes and some of Gallileo's telescopes.

Probably the museum that I am most fascinated with currently is in a little tiny Tuscan hill town, Volterra. Volterra sits high on a hill, as it's an Etruscan city. The Museo Guarnacci has the most incredible collection of Etruscan cinerary urns which is extraordinarily curated. Lotta adjectives and adverbs there but it's true. This is a place where time stands dead still. The museum itself is an old villa; it not only holds scores and scores and scores of the urns the Etruscans used for cremation-- alabaster, terra cotta, carved stone, you name it-- but they show them in their natural habitat in the Tuscan hillside. You experience what it was like for the archeologists to discover them. It's jaw dropping. Gives you perfect insight in the cultural and artistic heritage the Italians received from the indigeneous people, the Etruscans. You see where their exquisite design sense comes from. If I could go to only one museum in the world, I'd go here.

The one museum that's escaped me is Museo Archeologico Nazaional in Naples. It's here that the artifacts from Pompeii reside. I have always wanted to go there but literally can't find a travel agent to book me because...Naples is too dangerous. But I am going at New Year's. Yup. Gonna rent a car and drive down there because those collections have been together for too long without me. The Museum of the City of London is good as is the Museum of the City of Paris. Viking museums, too. I'd really like to see those... And American folk art museums, the world does not ever have too many....

(And Greenwich, outside of London; you take the boat up the Thames and get off in Greenwich and walk to the museum on time. FAScinating!)

JBelle
Bellemaison
The 'Kan EWA