This Is Not A Pipe

First of all, a belated update on the One Show...it was packed. Reese and I had a great time meeting new friends and appreciate our *not new* (but not old) friends coming out to support us.

Secondly, a friend and I toured 10 museum/gallery spaces on Thursday. 10.

Rice Gallery has an amazing summer window installation by Mike Stilkey called When the Animals Rebel. Thousands of old book's spines become the canvas for whimsical portraits of animals and people. Please follow the link on this one...it's worth it.

The Museum of Fine Arts Houston is classically a favorite. How can one go wrong at such a venerable institution? My friend particularly loves the impressionist era, so we focused our time on the Beck Collection and other impressionist paintings in the same area of the museum.

The Contemporary Art Museum was next with Black Light White Noise. It was like a children's museum for adults--very interactive. In one room there were giant 4' x 4' Plexiglas pods on the floor, that one was encouraged to enter. There was a lambskin fuzzy rug on the floor of the pod, and there were a few pillows around the perimeter on the inside...and headphones. A completely random story was playing in my pod about who knows what? I'm sure the piped in story was meaningful to the pod creator. Or not. Does it not seem that the goal of modern art is for it to be meaningless? The more meaningless it is, the more meaning we are expected to get out of it...right? Rene Magritte expressed this idea beautifully when he painted a pipe, and said about it, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe.", (or, This is not a pipe.), which is a painting we later saw in the Menil Collection.

"René Magritte described his paintings by saying,

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?'. It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable." (excerpted from the Wikipedia article)