CSotD: Mess up the Dutch Masters, and smile, brother, smile!
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"That is Priceless" is a new feature at GoComics, having started October 31, but you can find a significant backlog at Steve Melcher's blog, where he has apparently been adding irreverent titles to great art since 2009. There's even a book of them, if you're still shopping for Christmas or Channukah or the Epiphany or Chanukah or New Year's or Hannukah or the Feast of the Circumcision. Any of those potentially happy holidays. The last one not perhaps as happy as the others, admittedly.
(The Jewish holiday, by the way, lasts for eight days and each day has its own transliteration. If you mix them up, you have to give back all the gifts and start over.)
When this first appeared at GoComics, I knew it would end up as a CSOTD at some point, but I wanted to see if he could keep it up — I hadn't noticed the blog which proves he certainly can — and then it was a case of waiting for a good one on a day when it could rise to the top of the pile.
Today's cracked me up because, even if she is planning to combine all her ingredients, even if she is making some kind of dressing for the rabbit, it leaves the suggestion that she's going to cook it with the skin intact, since, logically, you'd prepare the rabbit before you made the dressing.
Speaking of which, I'd also suggest that Metsu needed to learn to paint faster, because that rabbit appears to have gone into rigor, and it does not appear to have been cleaned yet. This could get pretty nasty even without Steve Melcher's help.
The Great Masters play along with this adolescent humor (which, by the way, is a great kind of humor) by having such bland expressions on their subjects. There is a disjointedness in great art that you sometimes see in photographs of very young children doing hideous things to each other while gazing at the camera in complete ignorance of what they have wrought. Or are wrighting at the moment.
The trick to this feature is that, really, one should not look upon great art with too literal an eye, because then you start thinking things like, whatever she's got on her mind, she's about to slice her thumb open while gazing out into space. And you start thinking about that rabbit (see above).
The problem is that, every once in awhile, your BS detector goes off for a perfectly good reason. I was at the art gallery at Smith College some years back when my Smithie girlfriend and I came across this painting, "The Preparation of the Bride," by Gustave Courbet, and there was something so not-quite-right about it that we looked it up in the guidebook.
Turns out that Gustave had actually painted a picture of these women preparing the corpse of a young woman for her funeral, but, after his death, someone decided the nudity was not proper and the whole thing was just too morbid, so they painted a wedding dress on her and gave her an arm holding a mirror and then retitled it.
Knowing this helps to explain why she looks so … well … dead, as well as why so many of her bridesmaids are minorities. And it certainly makes the painting a good deal more interesting and valuable than it was before somebody fixed it up and sold it.
Which only goes to show you.
Sometimes the art is already hilarious. When it isn't, there's Steve Melcher.
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