Art Installation

Art museums butter their bread with "art installations", rooms filled with art that looks like plain ordinary stuff artfully arranged. (I collaborated on a screenplay years ago about an art detective. The funniest line from it was written by somebody else. The detective enters a museum gallery which is filled waist-high with mud and says: "I can't believe this is a forgery.") This is an illustrator's version of installed art. We all collect things. I collect old toys, and they turn up in my art. The arrangement here is influenced a bit by Saul Steinberg, but also (in the styling) by Elwood Smith and Steven Guarnaccia and Seymour Chwast. Our minds are all shadowboxes full of items glued together by Joseph Cornell. The art director on this was Rick Besser, but the art was never used.