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Photography Travel Blog

A Museum Crawling Day In The City Of Madrid

Inside the Queen Sofia Museum

Throughout this series thus far, you have seen pictures of the Churches and the monuments, of the road trips, and even those of the bizarre creatures and the futuristic buildings from Valencia.  On the 8th days, we dedicated the entire Sunday touring museums in Madrid.

Cynthia and I love to spend time inside a museum.  I reckon if we spend enough time inside museums, we could sharpen our sense of art appreciation.  I am not sure how museums are run in Singapore (perhaps we shall explore).  In Spain, Audio Guide rental services are provided.  We think Audio Guide is a wonderful innovation.  It is a headset that comes with a keypad.  At a given location, observe the numeric label besides the artwork, punch in the numbers, and listen to the commentary playback through the headset in the language of your choice.  We have learned how to appreciate cubism and realism.  And we have also learned what questions to ask when admiring art models in 3D.

As always, below are the options you may wish to read more about our trip.

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4 replies on “A Museum Crawling Day In The City Of Madrid”

Singapore museums have improved over the years, but what I hate sometimes are the overly-anal rules on photography. Sometimes the security guards will tell you that certain exhibits cannot be photographed, when there are no signs around saying so. From your photos, the exhibits in Madrid seem much more interesting than the Singapore ones!

Darkspore – Some museums in Spain also have the same rule. Some will have a blanket rule saying that no photography is allowed inside a museum. But we also observe that photography usually not allowed for “exhibitions” on the temporary galleries. I think those are still of high value that are still touring the world. Hence I can understand why photography is not allowed.

I can also see it from the museum perspective. Like it or not, there are still people who photography the artworks with flash. And flash is bad for artwork and we know it. Hence, it is much easier to stop people from taking photos altogether than trying to stop those who use the flash, that would be too late anyway.

Yes, the museums in the West are very interesting.

Hey nice photographs and it looks like they do have quite a lot of contemporary installation pieces there.

Actually, you CAN TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS in many Singapore museums and galleries for most exhibitions, except for those that are on loan from other museums (like blockbusters). The part which you can’t do is to use flash because it disturbs the enjoyment of other visitors and also degrades the pigments in the artworks and objects.

Honestly we are not doing that badly here in Singapore. In fact, the number of visitors to our museums exceed many in Europe except for the largest ones like the Louvre and British Museum. If I’m not wrong, the number of visitors to our National Museum will match that of Guggenheim Bilbao (in the Basque region of Spain) pretty soon, hitting the magical million…

Walter – Thank you for the insightful info on our national museums. I will certainly make a trip down to one and hope that I can take some photos and share over here!

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