Sunday, March 30, 2008

30 second art tour

We interrupt the crass and commmercial world of advertising to bring you a brief tour of of the world's most distinguished museums. First, these sightings at the Whitney Biennial:

Here is a kitty-litter box the size of a jacuzzi. It's filled with litter, thankfully unused. Like all real art it has a title: Inbox. Get it?



Going with the box theme, now we enter a boxy white room. It's empty but for a huge chandelier. See the awful paintings unframed on the wall? The paintings are meant to be awful. That makes them art! Ironic, isn't it? Those are almost the only paintings in the show.

Let's step over to this shack made of scrap-wood. It's just like shacks you see by old highways in the rural South. (Uber-urban curators love to *surprise us* by importing stuff from the real, un-rarified world.) Inside the shack, monitors show super-long videos of women with super-long (ankle-length) hair. Tending goats!

Let's hurry along to the room wallpapered in Whitney museum logos. Huge clay letters spell out Toothy Smile, Expresso and Focus Group. Why? Why not? Only hucksters will wonder why the chosen words don't include ties, pens, potholders and umbrellas which are for sale a few feet away in the museum store.



Here's an untitled photo of a sign at a funeral home. That'd make a nice blog post.





We've just enough time left to run up the street to the august Met to check out that Gustave Courbet retrospective. But what's this? An larger than life painting of, um, the business part of a spread-legged naked woman? What makes it world class art instead of high-class porn, is the title, of course: The Origin of the World. And, oh yes, the fancy frame. My, my. Look at the crowd. So many well-dressed middle-aged men stepping up for, uh, a closer look.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled program.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If it's ugly, pointless, and expensive, it must be art.

Ad Broad, oldest working writer in advertising said...

So THAT'S the criteria curators use these days. Thanks for clearing things up for me, Bob.