Originally published at: Mondrian painting hung upside-down for 75 years, mocking everyone who ever stood in front of it stroking their smug pretentious chins | Boing Boing
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Stroking smug, pretentious chins? Is this a new way of protesting petroleum use? Are we going to hear of protestors stoking portraits of the Hapsburgs?
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Beauty is in the eye of the upsidedown beholder.
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I have bought abstract paintings I found at the flea market that are not signed, and that I simply liked how they looked. I would flip them around occasionally and voila’: a whole new painting.
There definitely is a lot of ridiculous and self-important, overly intellectualized bullshit in the art world, but the professional art critics and their word-salad opinions have no power over those of us that just like pretty pictures, including meaningless globs of color.
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I hope there is a person out there who laughed their ass off about purposely hanging that upside down and no one noticing for decades
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Abstract painting hung upside-down get a shrug from me.
Representational art hung upside-down? Now that’s a giggle.
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Maybe it was upside down in his studio! 
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Who placed the wire/mounting hardware? Was it the artist or the gallery? Entirely possible it was upside down on the easel for a time because it would be easier to access the area he was working on.
Also - when it comes to this sort of thing - orientation isn’t really that important.
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That’s bound to be the theme of at least one carnival float next year.
Possibly at Cologne, though.
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" Le Bateau caused a minor stir when the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which housed it, hung the work upside-down for 47 days in 1961 until Genevieve Habert, a stockbroker, noticed the mistake and notified a guard. Habert later informed *The New York Times, which in turn notified Monroe Wheeler, the Museum’s art director. As a result, the artwork was rehung properly."
What a tortuous chain of events; it could be the plot to a Wes Anderson film. I’d like to see Adrien Brody cast as “the guard”, and Tild Swinton as “the stockbroker, Genevieve Habert”.
@Mister44 Orientation is, I hear, a Social Construct.
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˙ǝɯ oʇ ǝuıɟ sʞooן ƃuıʇuıɐd ǝɥ⊥
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How about rotating it by 90° four times a year.
Make it an event, a party to celebrate art, artists and the people who enjoy them. And let the art dealers pay for it.
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The joke is still on the gallery, the image is still 90 degrees out of true; Mondrian created it as a table cloth.
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All set; let’s go!
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Or a ceiling painting to decorate the bridge of - you know what, scratch that.
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That is not true.
Humans have a primal understanding of color, composition, etc. of the world around them. Art works to support or offset our expectations.
There is a significant difference in how that piece of art is perceived, depending on whether the far-apart yellow or the close-together blue dominates the upper part of the canvas.
One could argue for either orientation, but the point is the artist would have had a specific orientation in mind, and created the piece based on that.
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Jimmy Hill, Jimmy Hill, Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy; Jimmy
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