Museums - Tony Lane's Blog

I don’ t know how many of you have access to a near by art museum but I hope that you do and I hope that you support it. I know much of what many of you do can be classified as art. I know this because I read you. If you read me you know that almost nothing that I write can be classified as art. I hope that it is fun and sometimes I hope that while you are laughing you are also thinking a little but it’s not art. When I go to The Toledo Museum of Art and see what mankind has produces and continues to produce I am in awe. We spent most of the day at the museum yesterday. There was an exhibit of ancient Egyptian art. Ancient Egypt is one of my interests especially in the areas where ancient Egyptian religion and proto Judaism overlap so we went and saw it. We then walked through the museum. It is a magnificent building that was built and stocked by the Libby family. If you have glass drinking glasses there’s a good chance that Libby made them. Toledo is known as the Glass City for this reason. Anyway, it is a beautiful museum. As kids we were taken twice a year to the museum on field trips. I loved them. I loved seeing the paintings and sculptures and having the guide fill us in on the back-story behind the art and the artist. As we walked through the museum yesterday Barb and I were recounting stories from those childhood visits. One of my proudest moments was when the guide was showing us a modern painting and explaining that the prospective of the piece was uncertain because the objects that were being shown never interact with each other and therefore there was no way to determine if one was closer to the viewer or not. I pointed out that in the very corner and the lower left, one strand of one object was blotted out by the other and therefore the other had to be closer. The guide ran to get other people to look at it and they all agreed with me. Pretty cool stuff for a fourth grader. Come to Toledo. I’ll take you to the museum.