This is one of the weirdest pieces of art I think I’ve ever seen. It’s MC Cher’s 1956 lithograph, the print gallery. And it takes a little moment to wrap your head around what’s going on. We have a man looking at a picture of a boat. That boat is in a harbor of a small town with all these clustered buildings. And you go over and one of those buildings is a gallery full of artwork. And down the hall here, we find the same man staring at a picture of a boat. In a letter to his son, Echer called this the most peculiar thing that I have ever done, which for him is saying a lot. In 2003, the mathematicians Desmitt and Lstra offered a really delightful analysis of what’s really going on beneath the scenes of this picture, and it’s something himself didn’t even realize. The crux involves a very beautiful idea that can be summarized as taking the logarithm of an image. That might sound like nonsense, but I promise if you explain it the right way, it’s actually a really cool and abundantly reasonable thing to do. One conclusion that popped out of this analysis is an answer to a question that
[00:01:01] doesn’t even feel like it should have an answer, which is what exactly goes in this hole in the middle. If you think about it, that almost seems paradoxical because if you come at it from above, it looks like it should be part of the town, but if you come at it from the left, it’s more fitting to be part of the picture frame. Come at it from below and it seems more like part of the print gallery. So somehow all of the ambiguity about where exactly you are in this whole scene is compressed into that blank spot in the middle. The full video I made about this topic is really one of my favorites in a long time. So next time you’re in the mood to be out of the shorts feed and sitting down for something longer, it would mean a lot to me if you consider taking a look.