Darwin: Endless Forms

The exhibit itself, looking at Darwin’s impact on visual art and wider culture in the nineteenth century, is actually not as catastrophic a place to take someone you are romantically involved with as it first sounds. There are enough unintentionally humorous pictures and objects to smooth over the fact that you’ve taken her to a free art exhibition instead of an expensive restaurant or, you know, somewhere actually romantic. The best room, however, has to be what must unofficially be called ‘the Sex Room’. It carries a parental warning and examines randy old Darwin’s influence on depictions of sex and attraction (‘survival of the fittest’ nudge-nudge, wink-wink). It also has some truly fucked up shit in it, such as a realistic drawing of a monkey going down a woman. You can now see why the Telegraph gave it five stars. It was also in this room that we discovered that I wasn’t the most inappropriately dressed person there. A tall blonde crammed into a slutty blouse, mini skirt and white stockings complete with little black bows at their tops was tottering around in hooker-heels. Disappointingly she was not also being pleasured by a monkey. Marvelling at the inappropriateness my own blonde intimated that she must be foreign. I was about to get all high and mighty about prejudice when she promptly started speaking in German. Maybe she was discussing the English tit wearing the sunglasses in a dark museum.