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Apparently it is Administrative Professionals day. Administrative Professionals, I salute you!

I'm kind of glad now that I have the day off, because even a doctor's appointment is preferable to sitting at the desk taking flower deliveries for other admins all day long. I don't actually want flowers, but a card or something would be nice. Problem is, since I belong to a couple of different departments, everyone thinks it's someone else's job to pet me and feed me.

This morning, Christies is holding an auction preview downtown of a bunch of American artists; not normally something I'm that fascinated by but they have a couple of Sargents, apparently, and I've only ever seen his murals in person. So in a couple of minutes I'm off to downtown, and then catching lunch (probably at M Burger, which I've decided to give one more try) before my checkup.

My temp better not be touching my stuff.

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Instead of the auction house I washed up at the Federal Reserve Money Museum. They let you design your own moneys. How could I resist?

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That last post should have had an image attached. Let's see if I can make it work this time...

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I am home! THAT WAS AWESOME.

So, I was going to this auction preview, but it opened at ten and I didn't want to be the first person there, especially since it's not like I am actually going to buy a $700,000 Sargent watercolour (especially not THAT Sargent watercolour, but I'll get to that in a minute). So I thought I'd walk down to the Chicago Board of Trade, which I'd never actually seen, then do a loop around the block back to the hotel where the preview was.

I was walking down Jackson when I turned to my right and noticed something moving through the window. It turned out to be some kind of Rube Goldberg device with bouncing balls. I didn't actually press my nose to the window in fascination, because the window had HUGE IRON BARS across it, but I did look for a while, then did an about face and went back to the doorway. The doorway...of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

I had no actual idea what I was doing, but there was definitely a museum in that building somewhere, and secret museums delight me. So I walked through the door and to my left were two gigantic security guards. (Possibly they were some kind of actual government law enforcement; they were bigger and scarier than standard-issue private security tends to be.) They asked me if I needed help, and I said "I'm here to see the museum".

So the slightly smaller of the two says "Right this way!" and keycards his way through a door. I follow, and we end up in a narrow hallway with a metal detector and x-ray machine in it. Bear in mind I still don't actually know what the hell museum I'm seeing. But I take off my bag and coat and hat and walk through the metal detector while he makes sure I'm not packing heat, and then he keycards me through another door, and there I am, in the MONEY MUSEUM.

I KNOW.

It's a small museum, but it does not lack entertainment. There are tons of old currency in glass cases, and a bunch of placards about what the Federal Reserve does, though I didn't read them, so I still don't know. There was a display of money where you could push a button to see if the bills were real or counterfeit, and a cube with a million dollars in one dollar bills in it, and a money-shredding machine that demonstrates how "unfit" bills are destroyed. Next to the money-shredding machine is a bin of "Fed Shreds" which are little sample bags of shredded money that you can take. And of course the currency designer, which lets you add images, text, and "security devices" such as microprinting to your currency. The Rube Goldberg device turned out to be a demonstration of "the life cycle of a dollar bill" except totally in no way informative, it was obviously just there to entertain. And it did.

So yeah, surprise museum that I almost had to get patted down before entering.

The Christie's preview was less than impressive. They only had one Sargent and it was dreadful -- I love Sargent, he's one of my all time favourites, and I have never seen him put out crap like that. They had a mediocre Hopper as well, but it was a pretty small showing all round. They did have one absolutely delightful still life by Charles Demuth, very crisp and vivid pink blossoms, but that was about it.

I ended up leaving pretty quickly, and caught the bus up to Northwestern Medical, where I had a checkup. I did stop at M Burger for lunch; I grudgingly will admit they have stepped up a bit from the last time I ate there. The fries are now served hot and the burger tastes like it has actual seasoning of some kind. On the other hand, they still play light pop at tooth-grinding volume and didn't ring up my fries the first time, plus it's still outrageously expensive, so it's only been moved from "Place I will never eat again" (Corner Bakery, I'm looking at you) to "Place I will eat if I am in the area and want hot food".

I'm sure you will all be happy to know I didn't almost pass out this time when they drew blood. I did warn them what had happened last time, so they let me sit for a little while afterwards and gave me a tiny bottle of juice to drink. Anyway, the upshot is that barring anything absolutely freakish with my blood test results, I'm in good health and likely to stay that way.

And thus home, where I'm contemplating some kind of paiper mache project with my Fed Shreds.

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So when I posted that I was going to see this Christie's preview, queenlily had a thought: "I wonder if Christie's is showing any of these?"

That link goes to an article about how the staff of the Westervelt-Warner Museum came into their museum one morning to find a sizeable chunk of the collection missing from the walls, having been removed to be sold at auction. I confirmed that at least a few of the paintings were there -- I saw "Seal Rock, California" and "Silver Cove" and remarked that if they had sold the Sargent, they weren't losing much. (The one I saw was not View Of Capri, which is or was in the museum's collection; possibly it went for auction, but it wasn't on display at the viewing.)

It does lend a sense of the shady and roundabout to my morning's visit, though. It's sad that Demuth's likely going from a museum into private hands; I was thinking this morning it was a shame it wasn't on the wall of the Art Institute somewhere.

Anyway, I started digging a little deeper, and I'm going to try to distill this twisty little story for you. I'm not familiar with the Westervelt-Warner Museum, and their website looks like it was designed by a very earnest college freshman, so it took a bit of digging to figure out what was going on.

( Art, fathers, and sons. )