Google Street View Is Worth A Thousand Words
- Katherine Arkady
- Apr 29, 2024
- 5 min read
In my third manuscript, I wrote a chapter about two of my characters visiting the Art Institute of Chicago for a date. They have a great time. They split a weed edible. Artwork began to breathe. Hands are held. They have a great time.
How could I write about a date at the Art Institute of Chicago when I had been there once, three years prior, for a total of two hours? Do I have gigs of recorded video? Do I have journals filled with details? Do I have a photographic memory or hyperthymesia?
No.
But I do have access to the internet!
From the comfort of my kitchen counter, I could take a point-and-click stroll through the Art Institute of Chicago via Google Maps Street View: https://tinyurl.com/AICGoogleStreetView (It's shortened because the google url is several lines long and I didn't want to do that to you.)
I took a journey. I felt the environment of carefully arranged lighting and carefully curated art. With this resource, I was able to gain environmental perspective of the character's experience. Notes written include but aren't limited to:
couples would probably like to view pieces in the smaller alcoves so they can stand closer to one another.
wide, almost square hallways instead of doors to let the big pieces through
soft lighting everywhere, nearly dreamy spotlights on the pieces
Items in the Gift Shop Ideal for a Stoner Experience
Music boxes that plucked metal tines, sparkly out-there necklaces, art clocks that...probably tell time, books about architecture including but not limited to "stone," "concrete," and "brick."
"Imagine waking up one day, hammering rusty nails into wood, and selling it for millions"
"Is that how it works?"
"I don't know. (Art dealer friend) would have a lot to say about it."
While the spotlights existed to put the best light on the pieces of art, they did no justice for the walls. Like a burden, the shadow cast by the frames dumped blocks of harsh, then diffused, then barely there shadows onto the walls. The painted lilac walls looked like rancid wine under the shadows.
"What do you think a frame like this would go for?" Theo pointed at a thick one with ornate filigrees. "Maybe find something nice for my uh--" He chuckled. "--kitchen."
"I'd say at least $100 for every century so...$500?"
"Oh we ought to go got something more economical in the 18th century."
Was the painting still "generously on loan" if the loaner was getting a massive tax break?
Bonus of bonuses, I got recommendations in Google Reviews of what pieces to check out!
Now, copyright laws and all that come into play when some pieces of art have been blurred away from view. I get it. There are limits to the internet. However, the museum itself has a website sharp with details. Check out their online collection here: https://www.artic.edu/collection
Because of this resource, I was able to get detailed information about the pieces I ended up spotlighting in my manuscript:
The Bewitched Mill
Reference Number: 1931.522
Copyright: Public Domain
Date: 1913
Artist: Franz Marc
German, 1880–1916
"Among the German Expressionists, artists who used strong color and exaggerated form to express emotional content, Franz Marc was unique in his empathic interest in the life of animals. “Is there a more mysterious idea,” he asked, “than to imagine how nature is reflected in the eyes of animals?” Beginning in 1905, he devoted himself to representing the world with a fresh and purifying vision. Marc painted The Bewitched Mill following a sojourn to the Italian town of Merano in the southern Tirol. The work’s title refers to the “magical” harmony he sensed there between human life, represented by the houses and mill on the left, and nature, embodied by the lyrical region of trees and animals on the right."
Sky above Clouds IV
Reference Number: 1983.821
Copyright: © The Art Institute of Chicago
Date: 1965
Artist: Georgia O’Keeffe
American, 1887–1986
"Painted in the summer of 1965, when Georgia O’Keeffe was 77 years old, this monumental work culminates a series inspired by the artist’s experiences as an airplane passenger during the 1950s. Working in Abiquiu, New Mexico, O’Keeffe began around 1963 to capture the endless expanses of clouds she had observed from airplane windows during trips all over the world. Beginning with a relatively realistic depiction of small white clouds on a three-by-four-foot canvas, she progressed to more stylized images of the motif on larger surfaces. O’Keeffe wrote:
'I painted a painting eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide—it kept me working every minute from six a.m. till eight or nine at night as I had to be finished before it was cold—I worked in the garage and it had no heat—Such a size is of course ridiculous but I had it in my head as something I wanted to do for a couple of years.'
In 1970 Sky above Clouds IV was scheduled to be included in a retrospective of O’Keeffe’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Art. After being shown in New York and Chicago, the painting was determined to be too large to enter the doors of the museum in San Francisco. It thus remained on loan to the Art Institute for more than a decade, while the artist and public-minded collectors of her art arranged for it to join the museum’s permanent collection.
The special relationship between O’Keeffe and the Art Institute began in 1905, when she enrolled as a student at the School of the Art Institute. Her first museum retrospective was organized here in 1943. Later, as the executor for the estate of her husband, the pioneering American photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe presented the Art Institute with an important group of modernist works, including a number of her own, many of which are on view in the galleries of American art. She continued to make significant additions to this bequest until her death, at age 98, in 1986."
Nighthawks
Reference Number: 1942.51
Copyright: Friends of American Art Collection
Date: 1942
Artist: Edward Hopper
American, 1882–1967
"About Nighthawks Edward Hopper recollected, “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.” In an all-night diner, three customers sit at the counter opposite a server, each appear to be lost in thought and disengaged from one another. The composition is tightly organized and spare in details: there is no entrance to the establishment, no debris on the streets. Through harmonious geometric forms and the glow of the diner’s electric lighting, Hopper created a serene, beautiful, yet enigmatic scene. Although inspired by a restaurant Hopper had seen on Greenwich Avenue in New York, the painting is not a realistic transcription of an actual place. As viewers, we are left to wonder about the figures, their relationships, and this imagined world."
Movements
Reference Number: 1949.544
Copyright: Public Domain but Credited to Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Date: 1913
Artist: Marsden Hartley
American, 1877–1943
"Unlike many other American artists, Marsden Hartley was more drawn to German Expressionism than to French modernism, and executed this painting in Berlin. Made on the eve of World War I, Movements possesses a turbulent energy that sparks associations with both the vibrancy of modern Berlin and movements of music. Like the Russian Expressionist painter Vasily Kandinsky, Hartley sought to make his work more like music, which he admired for its non-narrative nature and its potential to be purely spiritual or separate from material reality."
So maybe it doesn't take a trip to the AIC to write about it, it just takes an internet connection. If you want to know more about the date at the Art Institute of Chicago, it's in my third manuscript.
Use the internet's powers for good,
Katherine Arkady
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