Since we hadn’t been to an art museum in donkey’s years and we were over in western NY the last few days, we thought we’d shuffle off to Buffalo to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Mercifully, we looked at the website for the museum hours and discovered that it was not a generic sort of museum at all but was devoted almost entirely to modern art. We were not going to drive at least an hour and pay a bunch of money for parking and admission just to look at art we don’t even like. As blogger Doug Wilson recently remarked
We will have to mortify our pride. We will have to crucify our disdain. We will have to admit that Norman Rockwell was a better painter than Jackson Pollock. It will get easier after that.
So, since we were still hoping to see some art we actually wanted to look at, and since at one time we were fairly avid birders, we decided to head off an equal distance in the opposite direction to Jamestown and take a look at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute.
In addition to the Peterson art and artifacts, which were very nice, there was a sort of featured exhibit of paintings by a SUNY Fredonia professor of—wait for it—dead birds. I kid you not:
The burnt match next to every bird in every painting in the exhibit was partly for scale, but partly to make the viewer feel guilty for contributing to the demise of bird species (although we’re pretty certain that plenty of species of flora and fauna have gone extinct before humans were around or for reasons that have nothing to do with humans per se—but I digress).
So we traded looking at abstract Pollockian paint splatters for looking at realistic painted bird carcasses. And burnt matchsticks.
I can’t understand why that professor didn’t include a painting of a Norwegian Blue: