Vermeer in Tokyo is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik
The Daily Pic: Vermeer's picture has been put on the streets to earn its keep.
(Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague)
This, of course, is Johanes Vermeer’s iconic (if only as of recently) “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, which was seen by 758,266 people in a Tokyo museum last year, in a “Treasures of the Mauritshuis” show that was the best-attended exhibition of 2012. And that’s a very bad thing – a tremendously precious object risking the inevitable wear-and-tear of travel, to grace a Greatest Hits extravaganza that has no point except to get turnstiles turning and tickets selling. To be further convinced of the evil of such things, read my diatribe on the exhibition-industrial complex, which hit the Web today. (Some of you may also be interested in news about me that’s in the very last line of the piece.)
For a full visual survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.
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