Because he likes contemporary art, and my knowledge stops short at 1900, I was scrambling to find the right museums to show off, but we made it to the Centre Pompidou (Parisians call it Beaubourg) and the less well-known but equally awesome Jeu de Paume.
The Centre Pompidou is having a very extensive, very intense feminist art exhibit. This stuff is no joke. There's a lot of blood, a lot of nudity, and a couple signs warning that the content of one room in particular "might hurt some viewers' feelings." The Boy didn't even roll his eyes once. What a great guy :)
Even better was that going to see the permanent collection at 5:30 on a Friday, it was free for under 26 year-olds. The museum also houses a library and a very swank restaurant, George, which a friend who went on a date there tells me is delicious and extremely expensive.
Jeu de paume is the old way of saying "tennis" in French. The museum is located in the Tuileries, the gardens of the Louvre, where the royal tennis courts used to be. After wandering through some painfully avant-garde exhibits ("Walking into this small white room affects the dimensions of another white room in Prague" and a 15 minute video of a shack surrounded by trees) and a three story retrospective of one photographer who must have lived to be at least 100, we came to the "Vidéothèque éphémère". It's an exhibit of short videos featuring everything from a made-up conspiracy theory about the Spice Girls, ALF and Princess Diana living in Chile to a silent montage of birds swarming at dawn to Willie Nelson. Definitely one of the most entertaining exhibits I've been to here. Again, under 25's get a reduced tarif of 5.50 euros here.
The Boy is nothing if not a man who knows what he likes, and one of the things he likes is fondue. So after our museum ventures, we warmed up with a big steamy pot of cheese on rue Mouffetard, a low-key little street chock full of bars and little bistros in the 5e arrondissement. A very successful weekend.
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