This entry was originally posted on 2020-Nov-13. We were reminded of it when reading Tom Falco’s newsletter today (corresponding to this post on his Tomversation blog), which reprints this panel along with pictures and commentary on his recent New York visit.
Tomversation sent in by Ollie. As a CIDU? Didn’t say! Is the joke like those set at modern art galleries, where a frame surrounds a stain on the wall, here turned into a window mistaken for an art object? Or is it just a fond reminder that one can tire of any quality of indoor view and welcome a glance out a window? [2022 comment: Falco’s title “The grass is always greener” would seem to fit better with that latter view.]
Next mystery: Is it meant to be somewhat realistic? So these would be a collection of posters on paper, mounted on somebody’s wall? No? An actual touring exhibition of masterpieces unlikely to be loaned out and then exhibited together? Nah.
Does it remind you of one of those paintings that show other paintings, maybe in a gallery setting? Like this one by Samuel F. B. Morse:
[2022 comment: The Picasso has been identified by commenter Olivier: “BTW, the Picasso is ‘portrait de femme au béret orange et col de fourrure (Marie-Thérèse)’, 1937.”]
And now, for something not quite completely different! Still in the realm of fine arts and popular suspicion, this OY from Cornered, sent by Olivier.
Wrong Hands can be cynical without being mean:
Oh, how those New Yorkers love themselves some art:
And The Far Side on “The Art of Conversation”. Sorry, just a link, not a copy.
https://www.thefarside.com/2020/10/30/2
And just be hush-hush about this, okay? —
Comics I Don't Understand 
No, you’re Paul.
Paul? Wut?
Dana, I think larK was suggesting the character in the comic resembles Paul Simon more than Artie Garfunkel.
Yup, that was all.
Did you not reset the survey counting? The results I saw looked like more than an hour or two would accumulate.
You might as well delete the link to the Far Side comic, since it expired a long time ago.
Yes, we have quietly become a little more casual about screenshotting.
All the paintings in the New Yorker comic are trash…they’re blurry. I think they’re out of focus. 🙂
Some decades ago my dad (who died in the 1990s) showed me a comic. It was either in the NY Times or the New Yorker. Similar to two of the comics – It showed a man in front of window in an art museum. He has the recorder with the tour of the exhibit. Tag line was something like “you are now looking out the window, please move on”.
I remember a cartoon in Playboy magazine a long time ago. It was by Robert Taylor. It takes place in the art gallery of a rich man’s house with many large paintings on the wall. The guest is staring at a scene with lush green rolling fields, a couple of trees in the foreground, and three naked women lounging under the tree. The host says “No, that’s not a painting — it’s a window. Why?”
Memory: In the comic strip “Monty”, the character Moondog gets a job as security guard in an art museum. He and another guard look at a Roy Lichtenstein comic strip painting, and class it as photorealism.
Odder memory: The 1960s Saturday morning cartoon show “Milton the Monster” included a short titled “Gogh Man Gogh” (thank you, Wikipedia). In it, a fox decides to make big money in modern art and kidnaps an organ grinder’s monkey to produce it. The problem is, everything the monkey paints, even with his feet, is a perfect copy of an old master.
Mark, I know just a few days ago I was trying to track that cartoon down and have a look at it; with the name ffolkes also involved.
But it’s not a mysterious coincidence. While reviewing this thread from its original run before reposting, I saw where you had in fact commented on it in that occasion.
Now I would like to track it down!
I remember a cartoon in Playboy magazine a long time ago.
Reading it for the cartoons, eh?
“Reading it for the cartoons, eh?”
Yes, when they stopped publishing cartoons I let my subscription expire.
Would I even be here if I were not reading it for the cartoons? I’d be following “Pictures of Naked Women I Don’t Understand” or something.
@ Mitch – Was there some special reason that you wanted to append that comic in the comments? It’s already above in the main post.
Ha! No, I was just browsing semi randomly in my iPad photos library, and came across this and had a nice snicker. So I took a minute to search in Comments for “art gallery” and tried to not struggle too hard to do a comments-embed with the limited flexibility of working in iOS (or maybe now called iPadOS?). No right-click, no Post Image, no well known screencap tool to clip less than a full screen.
@ Mitch – This doesn’t help with “local” images, but for online images, I use the applet “View Source”. It’s extremely primitive, but it works even on the most modern iOS versions (including 15.x), on both iPhones and iPads. Give it a URL, and you can browse the HTML source code to extract the exact URL of the image.