It’s a new year, Scatterers: Think outside the box
Sometimes you write a post purely as an excuse to run a picture you’ve fallen in love with. This is one of those times.
That kid crawling out of the picture frame is from an 1874 trompe l’oiel painting by Pere Borell del Caso, and he lives at the Banco de Espana in Madrid. The title of the painting? Escaping Criticism. Seems Pere Borell had some issues with the nattering nabobs of the press, and he whipped up a pretty foolproof case for himself.
Escaping Criticism is part of the exhibit Genuine Illusions: The Art of Trompe-l’oiel, which opens Feb. 13 at the Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg. Besides fooling the eye, trompe-l’oiel is about wit: It has fun fooling you, and you have fun back. Critics be damned, right, kid?
Read more about it at Art Knowledge News.
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A couple of weeks ago the Oregon Jewish Museum reopened in new, much bigger quarters on Northwest Kearney Street in Portland, and I wrote about it in last Friday’s A&E section of The Oregonian. You can read that story, which discusses the new space’s first big show, The Shape of Time, here.
One thing I didn’t mention in that story: The museum shares a parking lot with its neighbor ComedySportz. Culture is all about collaboration these days, so think of the possibilities. Jewish humor is vital to the American comedy scene — it’s almost as if Jews invented American comedy, especially the urban variety. What might the Jewish Museum and the improvimaniacs at ComedySportz cook up besides parking Priuses if they really got their heads together?
Just a thought.
January 6th, 2010 at 9:50 am
My father, who was a painter and sculptor, used to say that in the evolutionary scale there are men, there are apes, and below them, there are critics. This keeps me a tad more humble than I otherwise would be, as well as a story about composer Edgard Varese walking down the street in New York in the company of NY Times music critic Olin Downes, who never ceased to accuse the former of making noise rather than music, when they spotted a dog lifting his leg against a lamp post. “You see,” Varese is said to have said, “the light is still shining.” Now that really keeps me in line! sort of.
As for thinking outside the box and the painting…I observed my grandson sitting in a big kitchen drawer the other day and tossing its contents out on the floor–if that isn’t an example of new thinking I don’t know what is: you get rid of what’s already there and start from scratch, never realizing, or refusing to realize as so many young contemporary artists of every discipline do, that because they’ve thrown everything out of the box (and forgotten what was in it) they’re making something that is new to them, but not to other people. And especially us pesky critics…