art in chicago

A couple of weekends ago, I escaped to Chicago to visit my bestest friend in the whole wide world. After a quick plane flight (just a plain ol' flight, nothing extraordinary) and a taxi ride through the ghetto and the barrio, I arrived at the University of Chicago's Mandel Hall just in time to catch the second half of a performance by the Brentano String Quartet. Check out the recordings on their webpage. It's too bad they don't have video, though, because they were very ...animated. Seriously, I thought that the first violinist was going to launch off his chair and leap around the rafters for a while before coming back down to the stage. Really, though, they were quite good. Unfortunately, I missed the first half, which was when they played really weird contemporary stuff. This is unfortunate because I probably would have liked it a lot. Because I'm weird like that. For the same reasons I am more drawn to this than to this. Not that I don't appreciate the latter; I am just less likely to hang it on my wall. Speaking of experimenting with art, check out these, produced by people with way too much time on their hands. Not that I consider them innovative geniuses, but the concept is sort of fun nonetheless. My absolute favorite is the last one on page 10. Anyway, now that we are on the topic, it seems a good time to say that I got to visit the Art Institute of Chicago. There I saw cool stuff like this and this and this. Possibly the most famous painting is the collection is Seurat's A Sunday on the Grande Jatte. I do like a good pointilist work. And check out the Christmas cards they had in the store! Oh, how I love love love art museums.