Trading the Real for the Fake

I daresay that Georges Seurat’s painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is only recognizable to most people in the most vague, I-think-I’ve-seen-a-poster-of-that-somewhere-before sort of way, and most of us would surely not be able to describe it sight unseen. I suppose there’s nothing inherently wrong with this; the painting is more than a hundred years old and Seurat is not a tip-of-the-tongue artist like, say, van Gogh or Monet.

But I find it very interesting that when the cast of NBC’s TV show, The Office, is inserted into an updated, posterized version of this painting, people absolutely come alive with passionate discussions of every detail of the scene. If you don’t believe me, click the preceding link and scroll through the comments section.

Here’s a comparison of the two scenes; click on the yellow vertical slider and move it across the original painting to reveal the TV poster. By the way, if you are indeed one of those artsy purists who knows their stuff, I apologize for cropping and stretching the original slightly to make it overlay more closely to the poster. Sacrilege, I know, but we have a point to make in the most twee way possible.

I guess it’s not a big deal, but it kind of saddens me that we can get so excited over a TV show and its characters, and yet a piece of amazing artwork merits nary a second glance. Have we become so cheap in our pursuits?

And here’s how out of touch I am: I didn’t even know Michael was no longer on “The Office.”