Elevator Art

I haven't been to a museum or a gallery in a while and I kind of miss it. I was just thinking about that when I was scrolling through a social media feed and looking at photographs. When you go to a gallery you can walk around; it's a horizontal experience. If you see something in the distance you can walk over and look at it. That was the experience I had when I went to the SOFA and EXPO shows every year which have 25 miles of art. It was its own kind of "scrolling", but rather a strolling. If something caught my eye I'd go over and look at it and then something else might catch my eye and I'd go over and look at that. But you don't have that experience on social media. It's mostly a constrained vertical experience.

Say you went to a gallery and it was all vertical and you'd have to take an elevator up and down. Every floor would show a different piece of art. So you'd go up to 6, down to 2, up to 10. As a novelty (in addition to "ambient" art being on the walls of the elevator), a "vertical" or stove-piped experience might be fun. But I prefer the horizontal context of the gallery, perhaps in a gallery district, or in the case of SOFA and EXPO, being out on Navy Pier.

I like to slow down and look at things. I like to look at the dimensions--something that you miss on social media. Take, for example, Warhol's Mao. There is one at the Art Institute which is about 12x12 feet or larger. They've moved it around a lot, but when I saw it, it was placed at a focal point, so when you walked by a particular hallway you would see it at the end of the hallway. If it caught your eye you can go down and look at it. On the internet, that same image might be 200x200 pixels--almost the same experience as looking at it down a hallway–and you can't go up close to it and you might not realize the actual size. I think it matters that we can look at art just a few inches from the surface, even if we can't see every detail up high. (That's the issue with the huge Rubens paintings where you would really like to see the details at the top of the paintings). You can, of course, do that on certain sites like Google Art where you can zoom in and see the brush strokes, but again, it's not the same experience. It's a different color space.

On a walk a few days ago I walked past a fitness center and there were two pieces of art on the wall that caught my eye. Then I realized what I saw were digital prints and I felt disappointed. I'd actually like to see the real paintings. Perhaps the original was a very small 6x4-inch image and was enlarged to 6x4 feet. It's a distortion of dimensions, which is essentially what we get on the internet.

It's important to, at some point, go to a gallery or a museum. But that's becoming rare. It's very expensive to go to museums. When I was a loyal member of the Art Institute I used to go several times a week on my lunch hour and enjoyed looking at the art in situ.