Artwork captions are some of the few delimited areas in a museum that are consistently crap. The little white cards stuck next to a painting that try to tell you something about what you’re standing there to see, that err to the pompous, obtuse, practically cynical in how little they manage to say with so many obscure words. Museums have high status, they’re valued differently in the era of self-trumpeting as one of the last places of anointment, cool reserve, but I wonder if it’s being lost. There’s a good reason, in the trade, that those little cards are called tombstones; when museums feel like morgues for art, the caption cards are the death notices.
Of course, there’s exceptions. Living for a while in Paris, France, we got to discover a range of really good small museums. One favorite was the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, the Museum of Hunting and Nature, in 17th century private mansion on the rue des Archives. A favorite in part for feeling weird, idiosyncratic, full of life but not self-importance, and also for a sense of playfulness around the artworks’ value.
One example:
And the tombstone:
What could be more surprising than the intervention of the unexpected in the calm of everyday life? This scene of a fight between domesticated cats in the middle of a kitchen with bourgeois comfort is surprising. This painting is an opportunity to show the brilliance with which Flemish painters knew how to give still life its letters of nobility. The painter depicts a magnificent still life composed of rich silverware, silver cutlery, a bread basket containing peaches, as well as artichokes arranged in a basin.
This composition is suddenly disrupted by the arrival of three furious cats. The unbalanced felines defy gravity, one grabbing the other by the throat while a third watches the scene, spitting and ready to pounce. This scene is in keeping with the Flemish artistic tradition of depicting struggling animals. This subject is represented in particular in the work of Nicasius Bernaerts (Antwerp, 1620 - Paris, 1678), the main proponent of Flemish animal painting who spread his models to France.
Look how much we learned, and what could be more surprising indeed.
I don’t have much experience in the art world, but I like to look at pictures, I form relationships with certain works, and I guess I appreciate it when the people and places that own them show a sense of affection, too.
Bookselling sidebar: Well, this is what it looks like when your publisher commissions a skateboard deck for a book contest and is cool enough to send you one, too:
Remarkably, the beat goes on for Everything Now. This week, you can catch me (over-caffeinated and slightly hungover) on the podcast “How Long Gone,” in which we don’t talk about the book once. And it looks like some other interviews, reviews, and readings are still forthcoming. Watch this space (says nobody).
Many thanks to everybody for buying and reading and so on!
What the what? A (mostly) weekly newsletter by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin of (very) short essays about things he finds beautiful.
Rosecrans’s new nonfiction book, Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, is available from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. Other books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a list at Bookshop.