We’d rather get paid

I had an enjoyable afternoon at the Detroit Institute of Arts. I mostly went through the current special exhibits, then attended the Detroit Film Theatre.

* Ending soon is Humble and Human, three rooms of impressionist art from the DIA and a gallery in Buffalo. There are two to three paintings each from some of the big names of that era – Van Gogh, Renior, Gaugin – and a few other names I hadn’t heard of before. I noticed that a few of these artists, like Van Gogh, died in their 30s.

* The big exhibit at the moment is Detroit Collects, art from black Detroit artists purchased by Detroit residents. These works are from private collections and rarely seen in public. There was some really cool stuff.

* Perhaps the most famous painting in the DIA is The Wedding Dance by Peter Breugel, Elder. It was painted about 1560. It shows a village of people dancing in honor of the new couple. It has been moved to a special exhibit along with displays of how the DIA came to own it, what conservators found when they did some restoration work (a few of the men’s codpieces had been painted out), how Breugel worked (the scene was sketched before being painted), and where some of his materials came from (the red pigment came from Central American bugs), and that the top two inches of the painting are not original.

* The photography exhibit has photos of scenes around the Great Lakes by Jeff Gaydash. He took long exposure photos so things that moved (waves, sky) were blurry and stationary things (old dock timbers) were in sharp focus.

Supper at the cafe, then off to the DFT show, which was the British Arrows. I’ve posted about them before. These are the British commercials that are recognized for outstanding quality or content. So yeah, one pays admission and goes into a theater to watch commercials for 75 minutes. But there is this British sense about them that make them different and worth watching. Since I watch very little American TV I can’t say how different. The commercials are all on the British Arrows website. I’ll mention the ones that I appreciated.

* Bronze: Secret deodorant presents a lively song and dance. A woman sings that a female empowerment ballad is nice but we’d rather get paid the same as men.

* Silver: Trolling is ugly. A young woman posted a photo of herself online and waited for the trolls to attack. It didn’t take long. Whatever they said she needed to do to look acceptable, her team photoshopped her image to comply – skinnier arms, narrower waist, broader hips, bigger lips, and so on – and updated the online image. The result was quite ugly.

* Silver: 100 years. As the voice says women can’t do this and this and this we are shown images of women doing each of those things. This is in honor of 100 years since women were given the vote in Britain.

* Craft Gold: As characters sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow we see various LGBTQ people being accepted for who they are. There is Pride in London, but still more work to be done.

* A young man trains for the sport of synchronized swimming. How did he get into an all female sport? He never asked.

* And gold for the really gutsy: Viva La Vulva.