All in all it was just bricks in the wall

[austin_dern]

Wall art has long been one of the things that people can get worked up into a good fight over, much like politics, weather, attack trackballs, guitars, birds, green, pillowcases, serifs, frosting, lamps, cubism, dollops of things, and people who make little ticking noises and bob their heads while they're trying to navigate automated voice menus. Fortunately these fights over wall art tend to be short, evaporating before more controversial items like humidity, and resolve with the agreement that wall art collectors are silly, silly people who don't deserve the dignity to be made fun of thoughtfully.

The core of wall art is not and has never been the idea that walls need things to be hung from them as a way of preventing them from being altogether too wall-ish, so get that silly idea out of your head. Anyone can hang things on the wall, especially if the wall is one of those popular floor-mounted models which keep things on the now-horizontal wall from sliding down and which make the ceiling not so annoyingly far away. Ah, but the recognition that some vertical surfaces are just more appealing things than others, that's where art comes from. Art has many definitions, but the most compelling is the operational one: art is what people write angry letters to the editor about denouncing the idea that this thing can be art. So walls easily meet the definition, according to editors who think their correspondents have really lost it this time.

Surely the greatest wall art was John Banavard's Mississippi Panorama, a wall the length of the Mighty Mississippi and showing the astounding length and beauty of the then-untamed river. Banavard showed off his incredible portraiture from 1840 through 1868, when an historian for the official Military History of the Civil War realized that Banavard had just put walls up the entire length of the actual Mississippi and called that art. Soon Banavard was hounded by lawsuits from states including Louisiana, Mississippi (which had other things on its mind but felt pride required it act), Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Maine (which hadn't anything to do with the river or Banavard but thought this was looking to be very exciting and didn't want to miss out), and Winnemac (which never existed and nobody even reads about anymore). The Supreme Court in 1878 finally declared 5-2 in favor of the Radio Corporation of America's FM patent over Major Edwin Armstrong, a ruling which lead to complaints the Supreme Court had forgotten what the case was even about. On further review the Court demanded the head of Bud Selig, but relented when they remembered the rest of him would probably be brought along and it'd just clutter up their junk drawers anyway.

The pinnacle of artistic walls surely came with the Brutalist movement, with a powerful cement wall over 40 feet thick and reaching nearly a quarter of a mile high which, on its display a part of Expo '67, promptly fell over on top of the architectural review community. They agreed this was a triumphant wall for the ages, but a dissenting faction wished it had been placed a couple inches farther along so it wouldn't have fallen on their toes, legs, shins, knees, hips, rib cage, shoulders, arms, fingertips, fingernails, noses, and heads. The designers claimed doing so would have spoiled the artistic symmetries involved, which is a pretty good answer to offer whenever anyone complains about something to you.

The display problem has sadly never been solved for wall art and is one of the things keeping it from being a truly mass art form. The obvious place to hang a wall is on another wall, but then that wall has to be hung on something too, and that wall on another thing and so on. The famous belt around the world at 135 degrees east longitude started as an attempt at finally getting enough artistically hung walls in place that there wouldn't be an awkward ending, and all it's done is slow down people running the width of Asia. Someday there'll probably be an answer to this, but we always say things like that.

Trivia: General Electric opened WGY in Schenectady in 1927 as a mechanical television outlet; it remained such through to 1934. Source: Please Stand By: A Prehistory Of Television, Michael Ritchie.

Currently Reading: New Jersey Curiosities, Peter Genovese. It's kind of a Not Quite So Weird New Jersey tome, and refers to its actually popular spiritual cousin quite a few times.