My Darling B and I traveled to Milwaukee yesterday to look at art.
“To look at art” is possibly not the first thing you think of after “Travel to Milwaukee,” but they do, in fact, have a collection of art in a museum there, and it’s art by artists so well-known that even a country bumpkin such as I has heard of them. Right now, for instance, they are featuring the art of Georgia O’Keefe, who is not an artist I have heard of but My Darling B has, and she is just as much a bumpkin as I am, if not more bumpkinish, so there you go.
I talked B into going to Milwaukee to look at art yesterday because it was the 29th anniversary of our marriage, which I wanted to spend doing something special with her all day long. We have always had fun visiting art museums, partly to look at the world-famous art, but also to make fun of the silly art, of which every typical museum we have visited always possessed by the truckload. At the Milwaukee art museum, for instance, they had several of those wall-sized canvases painted a single primary color, one enormous canvas that was black, and one that was white with a slit down the middle of it. I imagine that last was created by an artist who stared at it for hours until, out of sheer frustration, he slashed at it with the pointy end of his brush, then set it aside in his studio where it remained until his death when it was sold by his estate for a million dollars.
After taking in the art at the museum, we did a bit of people-watching as we walked along the lakefront. The art museum seems to be the place to go with your wedding party to get photos of them. We saw no fewer than six different wedding parties outside the museum, and one of the parties was headed for a reception in the main entrance hall. Our best estimate for renting the main hall of the art museum for your wedding reception: All the money we would ever make in our lifetimes.
After walking around the museum for hours, we both decided we could use a cool, refreshing drink, so we drove a couple of blocks into town to visit The Broken Bat, a craft brewery that came highly recommended by a friend of mine, and he wasn’t wrong. They served what I thought was perhaps the best Belgian ale I’ve had in a long time. We had them line up tasters of almost every one of their beers and passed a happy hour or so sipping away the rest of the afternoon.
To finish off the evening, we had dinner a little further uptown at the Rumpus Room. As coincidence would have it, a hen party showed up while we were there, and another passed by on the sidewalk just outside the window where we were sitting. It seemed weddings were in the air this weekend.
The sculpture in the selfie photo above is, of course, the world-famous artwork of Gustav Dusseldorf Stopfurnose Von Runnen, who is perhaps most well-known for making bracelets out of old typewriter keys but whose real passion is carving alphabets out of full-size sheets of Styrofoam insulation which he mails at his own expense to municipalities across the country, and that’s why you see these “L O V E” sculptures no matter where you go.
This Is Drivel 