Wisdom and the Visual

Just returned from Ottawa, where I was squiring around three nice people from Paris, art connoisseurs and acquaintances of my close friend, the Compte de Rienville.* They had expressed an interest in viewing work done by Canada's Group of Seven. I was happy to oblige, knowing full well that Canada's National Gallery was not the Louvre.

The trip was a success, but what I would like to write about in this column is a discussion that took place over teas and scones at the Chateau Laurier afterwards. The topic was visual "art" that the public loved, and yet was rarely seen in a gallery. The quotation marks used in the previous sentence indicate that these examples would not be considered art in the usual sense.

Some of the examples given by my three guests were rather esoteric and European -- an advertisement showing Venus rising from the foam of a toothpaste bottle, or (in an "art is fun" exhibition some time ago)  Picasso's folded clock coming to life and being chased by Lewis Carroll's Alice as that 'very late' creature headed for his rabbit hole.

You can see how this stuff would stick in the mind.

My own examples were much more prosaic, although I still thought them memorable.

I mentioned the scene from the film, Ben Hur, where one could see  Stephen Boyd, the loser in the chariot race, being dragged away  all bloody and beaten up, but with a Bulova Accutron very, very visible on his wrist. Or in Franco Zefirelli's magnificent Romeo and Juliet, the opening shot of the street in  16th century Verona, all hot and dusty, the houses and shops close together, save for one towards the top of the screen -- a Volkswagen dealership.

"Oh", said my new found friends, "but those examples are all from films. Not quite what we meant."

"Well, I have others," I said. I then relayed an example from last week, where the TV Show, Saturday Night Live, showed Pope Francis at a Vatican window, releasing two doves of peace. A crow and a gull immediately attacked them.

"Nothing really funny there," my companions said.

"True," I admitted, "but what was funny was the sequence that followed showing Pope Benedict at a window further away, releasing said gull and crow and cackling darkly,"You go for it, my pretties."

"Now that's more like it," they stated.

I concluded with bringing out and showing them the latest cover of The Economist** where the editors were summing up the forthcoming Olympics in Sochi. There you could see Vladimir Putin as an ice dancer, doing a magnificent pirouette, while his pretty partner had fallen awkwardly right on her prat, cracking the ice. She wore a sweater entitled "Russia".

All admitted that would be a tough one to beat.

They were right.

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*A VERY CLOSE friend.  -- Ed.

** Issue dated February 1 -- 7, 2014. -- Ed.