A detail from Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook's "Two Planets: Millet's The Gleaners and the Thai Farmers" (Courtesy the Walters Art Museum and Tyler Rollins Fine Art)
This is a still from “The Two Planets,” a lovely series of videos by the Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, which just opened at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. (Click on the image to watch a video clip). Rasdjarmrearnsook went out into the Thai countryside with reproductions of great works of Western art, and got the locals to respond to them. As far as these rice farmers are concerned, Millet’s famous gleaners are hunting for bugs, and the haystacks in the background are trees made of straw. So much for the old cliche about art’s universality.
