Jacobsen's Ghost

Carl Jacobsen founded the world famous Carlsberg Brewery over 9000 years ago. I use "world famous" with a touch of irony because I had never heard of it before I came to Denmark and saw signs everywhere I looked presumptuously declaring Carlsberg to be "Probably the best beer in the world." The beer's OK, a couple grades above Keystone or Miller Lite. But I'm digressing.

You see, the Jacobsen became a big fucking deal in Denmark after starting his company and started what amounts to the Danish take on the Rockefellers. The Carlsberg foundation loans Denmark's national museum half of its permanent collection and owns billions more in assets. Many of this assets are pretty swell and accessible to the public. One of these is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (New Carlsberg Sculpture Collection).

Honestly, I didn't check out the museum because I get an erection at the thought of naked marble statues of Aphrodite. Rather, the museum has free admission every Sunday and I haven't done anything outside the house besides drinking for maybe a week now. It felt great finally having some purpose after laying in bed until 12 every day only to spend the rest of my time looking on the internet for new movies to watch. To be fair, it's been raining a lot lately so I haven't had much reason to go out.

I biked to the Glyptotek and got there an hour and a half before closing, which gave me more than enough time to go through the arc of fascination and boredom I expected from 10,000 old painting and sculptures. The whole place reminded me of the main visitor center in Jurassic Park. The ceilings were high, maybe 40 ft., and bordered with skylights that made the museum bright even when the sky was completely shrouded in gray.

The whole museum was actually spectacular. It was arranged like an art collection, but an art collection too big to fit in the building. Many statues found themselves in the main entrance way or in random inaccessible areas that were simply the only places left to put them. I could only appreciate a few of them because Greeks, Romans, and all Europeans after them took pride in their ability to copy their predecessors and create a body of work as diverse as a Taco Bell menu.

What I really liked about the museum was how much information was on the walls and under the works. Usually all I see is the artist, the medium, and the title, usually written in Danish. But here there were little blurbs about the historical place of many of the works. I felt like a scholar after going through only a couple of the rooms.

Replica noses that got taken off after collectors
thought they made sculptures less authentic

Tomorrow I'm going to Amsterdam so hopefully I'll have more interesting things to say about that than a marble museum.