TOWER OF LONDON

One of the pricier attractions is also one of the best. Tours are usually avoided but without the Beefeater key facts and attractions would have been sorely missed: The ravens, the gruesome torture, the gruesome executions—the glory of it all. Isaac Newton lived here and William Penn was imprisoned here before founding Pennsylvania. If you come on Sunday you can attend the service without paying admission, and the Chapel alone was worth the visit when you think of Kings and Queens who sat in those pews. No photography allowed in there.

B/W GALLERY

If you take a thousand pictures and get five great ones, I’d call that a good ratio.

THE BRITISH MUSEUM

These days, when I visit the Museum of Natural History in New York I make a point of going to see one room, once exhibit, whether it’s the meteorites or fossils or North American mammals because that’s about all I can comprehend, all one should comprehend at one sitting. So if you have only two hours at vast and impenetrable archive at the TBM, it’s pointless to pretend that you’ll actually digest what you see. Therefore the highlights: The Rosetta Stone, the mummies and Lindow Man and a bit of Roman and Egyptian art. The main exhibition, The First Emperor, was sold out weeks in advance, admitting people only with timed entry.

It's the little things you remember the most though, and The Lewis Chessmen were absolutely charming.

LEE MILLER

I’d never heard of Lee Miller (23 April 1907 - 21 July 1977) until I saw an exhibition of her work at the Victoria and Albert Museum the second day I was in London. The striking former model from Poughkeepsie, later turned photographer and WWII photojournalist, was something of a magnet for attracting some of the early and mid-20th centuries’ most fascinating personalities, the kind of rich and varied life of tragedy and triumph seemingly born in the right time and place.

Oddly enough, A phenomenal camouflage exhibit at the War Memorial Museum had a small display (above) featuring the artist Roland Penrose’s contributions for the effort during the WWII, Roland being her lover and future husband, she, obviously his muse at that point.

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM

Since I’d visited a smaller counterpart in Auckland a few years ago I quite by no real plan decided to visit London’s larger more involved galleries. Quite an achievement actually, with more information than one could possibly digest in months if they had the chance. War is a catalyst for so much that has become part of our culture, be it technology or art, it’s hard to imagine a world without it’s influence, as noxious and pointless as it often is.

Detailed exhibits on both world wars and all other conflicts, wartime poster art, camouflage, spying and a breathtakingly comprehensive and exhausting wing on the Holocaust were enthralling but left me somewhat numb. A realistic walk through of a WWI trench was fascinating enough to merit a couple trips through, though I found few people took the time to imagine themselves in a similar situation, as was the point of the exhibit.

JOSEPH BEUYS: FELT AND FAT

On entering the massive grand Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, it’s somewhat amusing (yet understandable) to see a crowd so enamored with Doris Salcedo’s brilliant rock-wall casting Shibboleth, an essentially incomprehensible crack that runs the length of the structure that would be difficult to interpret as a metaphor of racial divide without a comprehensive artist’s statement—this being the case for much of what’s stored here and elsewhere in galleries of the modern persuasion. Signs posted warning people to stay alert testified to those who had already found a way to hurt themselves in blissful exhibit interaction.

What’s fascinating about travel and visiting galleries in other countries is seeing exhibitions containing pieces I’ve seen elsewhere, whether here in New York or back in Seattle. Here at the Tate a retrospective of Louise Bourgeois contained pieces Cara and I had seen in 2006 on a day trip to Dia: Beacon, where Bourgeois is part of the permanent collection. Also on hand was a new acquisition, Deluxe, by Ellen Gallagher I had seen a few years ago at the fine Henry Art Gallery on the University of Washington campus. All this making up for the confounded, pretentious mess of a group show World as a Stage that found most spectators walking through faster than a midtown crowd speeding by a gauntlet of panhandlers on a street corner.

Finally, Piero Manzoni’s Artist Shit (1961) in person.