See the illustration? This is my idea of what a travelling art exhibit might look like (and look there's me walking through it)
The idea is simple enough - takte the paintings to the people, instead of the people traveling to the musty museums. But these are not the original paintings. These are exact copies on canvas - same size, color, brushstrokes, etc.. That can be done now. The originals are kept safe while the copies hit the road.
Note on the illustration the wall sections. Actually they are metal rectangular frames - sort of like coat racks - with either a curtain or light board attached as a background. The paintings themselves are securely hung from brackets connected to the bars at the top. The sections can either stand alone, be connected into a long row, or connected at right angles.
Each section is easy to both install and put away. To pack up the exhibit all you would have to do is take off the base supports (that keep the walls from falling over), and load the wall sections - paintings and all , as is, side by side, onto a truck.
That way an entire museum worth of paintings can be housed in 1 or 2 trucks and can travel to any small community. The drivers could set up the entire exhibit in minutes in a union hall, school auditorium, civic center, just about anywhere there is a large open room. And then, with it all set up, they and/or someone from that community could stand at the door and collect a dollar or two from every visitor to the exhibit.
It's a good way to bring great painting to everyone.
Just imagine you're in Tyler or Longview, Texas and you get to see 600 paintings and drawings of Van Gogh this month, 200 Rembrandt portraits next month, and 500 Impressionists paintings from Monet, Renoir, and Sisley on the month after!
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Once I was thinking how mean Corporate Art could get., how their weasel quotient was always beyond my imagination, and I thought to myself, "They are sooooo greedy they'd attach a pulley to the revolving door on their stores, hook it up to a generator and use their customers to generate them free electrical power!" And I imagined in my head 2 scenes at the same time. On the left I saw a donkey in the middle ages. He is strapped to a pole, a hard worn circle of paked dirt under his hooves. He is whipped from behind and forced to go round and round dragging the pole that turns grinding stones that grind the miller's grain.
On the right a modern day office building with revolving doors at the entrance. As people push through them, they turn a chain hooked to a generator. With each turn they crank/generate more power - people pushed power.
Then I chuckled to myself, "How diabolical!"
But then I thought again and said, "How ingenious!"
IF people knew that with every turn through a revolving door they were generating 100% clean energy and IF people had a way to opt out if they didn't want to generate power for that building/company; wouldn't that be a great way to harness wasted power, lower power use and all the waste and pollution that goes with it, and support clean, environmentally healthy 'sweat' electricity?
I liked the idea and I liked the idea even more the more and more I thought about it. What do you think?
CONTEST
The first person who can write us with the correct answer to the following art question will receive 2 free passes to the Inwood Theater or something nice for our out of town readers.
In 1919 this sci-fi (and more) author wrote a 2 volume history of everything, that begins with the formation of the sun. At the height of its popularity it outsold every other book by a living author. Name the book .
Answer to the last month's special TV contest question of" In the TV Show "Bob" the last of his 3 series, his cartoon Mad Dog was owned by a heartless conglomerate called "Am Can Tran Con Com Co" . What did that stand for?" was American Canadian Trans Continental Communications Company. Unless a name follows this sentence , there were no winners.
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