A New Experiment

KunstHausWein

Last night, after my raquetball game and before I hit the shower, my mobile phone was ringing. Turns out Janet had a last minute invite to an after hours open house at the LSU museum of art in the new Shaw Center downtown. So, I shower quickly, head home, change, and we were off. This put us in the Center shortly after 8. The building is hopping. Lots of events everywhere. We hit the 5th floor button on the elevator. We start to go up, but the light on the button won't stay on. We stop on 4 and someone who works in the building gets on. We hit 5 again and we start to descend, um not what we intended. We ask the worker what's up with the 5th floor. We arrive on 1. We keep talking, heading back up to 6 this time. The worker doesn't know what's up, so after we end up back on 1 we exit the elevator and wait while he checks into it. Turns out, the 5th floor doesn't work after 8pm. It's been a really crappy week for us (not getting into that though, it's over anyway) and we can't believe that we have an invitation to an open house at 7 and the elevator won't let us arrive, albeit late, but certainly the event is still happening. So, the guy offers to see if he can get anyone else to help. Soon after we end up in the freight elevator for a real behind the scenes look at the center. Once on 5, we were totally blown away with how wonderful this museum is. The exhibits are fantastic, very interesting, diverse, and beautifully displayed. The jade exhibition is phenomenal. Absolutely worth the trouble.

So, I've been thinking recently about how fortunate I am to be surrounded by art. And, I realized I often don't really appreciate it, especially the art that surrounds us everyday in our home. Thus, art appreciation Thursday was born. I actually had that thought earlier in the week, but kinda forgot about it with the surprise museum stop. After the museum we made a couple of cocktails and retired for the evening, but Janet remembered and she grabbed a Hundertwasser postcard off the wall. For this new experiment, we decided to make sure we pick a different piece of art from our home and look at it together for at least 5 minutes. The postcard worked well cause we were ready for bed. This turned into a 45 minute discussion covering topics from color theory, to death, to blogging, and probably lots more I can't recall. Couldn't have had a better start. If anyone else gives this a shot, let us know. The picture above isn't the one we looked at, but it's still a Hundertwasser. The link goes to the KunstHaus which speaks for itself.