Philadelphia Museum of Art, in person and online

After three days in Philadelphia, I was already eager to get to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I hadn't been there for at least 15 years, so I didn't remember much of anything about it. I discovered a bus that runs up there from right near my place. When I got there, I was distracted at first by all of the people imitating Rocky on the museum steps (there's even a recent book chronicling the people who do this). But then I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the building.

My pre-visit browse of the museum website didn't show any images of the building, which seems incredible after being confronted with the sheer mass and lines of the place. It's a fabulous setting for art, with classical architecture and high ceilings. The website, sans images, explains that the building "is considered one of the crowning achievements of the 'city beautiful' movement in architecture in the early part of the twentieth century." The way it perches at the end of a long avenue with a view down to City Hall and the downtown is breathtaking (I forgot my camera, but grabbed this pic from Britannica.com).

The place seems huge, but I was able to wander through 3 of the 4 major installations in 2 hours to get a sense of what I wanted to come back to see. The strength of the museum's collection is clearly the full-room installations from around the world, including a medieval cloister, a Japanese tea house, and British drawing rooms. The more traditional collections, though, I found a bit lacking. The early American painting collection was just okay, with the exception of a room of Eakins paintings (which aren't really my thing), and the European paintings in the 16th-19th century wing weren't overly impressive. I'm hoping that the one wing I missed--the 20th century European and American wing--has some show-stoppers.

Criticisms aside, I feel like I have a lot left to explore, both in person and online. The website has lets you see what is on display in each gallery, and has tours available as podcasts to download, so you don't have to pay for the audio guide. As you explore online, you can listen to an audio stop when you get to an object's web page, so you can tour from home, too. You can also add your own tags to any object in the collection online, which in the web 2.0 world is called "social tagging" or "folksonomy." It's a big step for a museum to let visitors classify things instead of curators, so I'll be curious to see how it plays out (the government is even funding a big experiment in this area called Steve).