Uncovering the meaning behind empty wine glasses

Blake Gopnik began a series in this morning's Washington Post on his experiment with "extreme connoisseurship," which entails looking at "a tiny corner of one work. If the art is really good, there will be at least a morning's worth of looking in a few square inches of it."  In his first foray, he visits The Phillips Collection to look at the wine glasses on the table at the center of that collection's most famous work, "Luncheon of the Boating Party," by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Gopnik admits that, "It isn't how most of us look at pictures. It's not even how most critics or scholars get to look at art, most of the time. But give it a chance, and it's the best kind of looking there is."

Gopnik's conclusion about the empty wine glasses in this painting:

If it doesn't represent things as they are, that's because it isn't trying to. It represents a kind of almost-sacred allegory in which, in a single moment of mystery that's been captured by the painter, the world has been transformed and purified and shaped into a better image of itself. It's a world where sex and class and income barely matter, so long as there's wine to be drunk.

Good little lesson on how to contemplate art.  Maybe Gopnik is reading more into it than Monsieur Renoir intended.  But I'm not sure that matters.  And I'm not sure it matters whether Gopnik's analysis is right or wrong or whether I agree or not.  What matters is the contemplation that the work inspired.  Read the rest of his analysis HERE.

In other art writing, the City Paper does it's annual Arts in Review.  Maura Judkis picks her favorite gallery shows of the year HERE.  Despite the crummy economy that affected the galleries, Judkis says, "There's much to be hopeful for." 

Louis Jacobson picks his favorite photography exhibits HERE.  He says, "[W]hat set these five shows apart was the thoughtful, enlightening, and in some cases quirky way in which they combined images with written backstories."