Fame, it’s so Cool.

A week or so ago, I put this image up in my post (about Axl Rose…):

Faith Ringgold - Who's Bad. 1988

Then, yesterday, I walked into the Arlington Arts Center, and, there it was!

I wonder if this is sort of like the Bader-Meinhoff syndrome, but with real stuff instead of words…

Like tourists obediently beelining to all the “right” spots, or like Duchamp and Warhol with their Mona Lisa, there’s something about the first encounter with something you already have a relationship with (or a strongly conditioned knowledge of).

It’s even better when it’s a surprise.

I can still remember the week before I started my undergrad. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (a.k.a. “the ‘tute”).  I went to wander around the museum, turned a corner, and there was Toulosse-Lautrec’s “At the Moulin Rouge”.  Like every high school kid who’s art teacher had never heard of the twentieth century, I thought Toulouse-Lautrec was just about the coolest thing to predate sliced bread.  Naturally, at age 18, I didn’t have any idea what was in the museum (you couldn’t look things up on the internet back then).  I went there, wandered around, and there was Lautrec’s coolest painting!

When I had a chance to visit the Prado, the surprise at “finding” Rogier Van Der Weyden’s “Deposition” made seeing it as memorable as the time I spent looking at Bosch’s more supremely famous “Garden of Earthly Delights”.

It’s all way better than a Brangelina sighting.