Art Boars at the Getty

Evidently the Getty wants to attract a whole new crowd–the Spike TV audience. Or maybe there just aren’t enough 13-year-old boys roaming the galleries. So, spending no doubt a whole pile of cash with M & C Saatchi LA, the museum promotes newly acquired Calydonian Boar Hunt by Peter Paul Rubens, with an ad purporting to be a tabloid, complete with screaming headline. According to agency CEO Huw Griffith, this is an effort to

make art more accessible to a wider, more diverse audience. How often have you stood in front of a painting and wondered what was going through the artist’s mind? When these works of art were created they were the main medium of the day–they set out to tell a story to an audience in an often dramatic way, just as the media does today.

Translation: this should fetch the mouthbreathers. For an agency that prides itself on brutally simple thinking, this is a mouthful of patronizing mush.

The essence of great tabloid headlines is the clever hook–KISS YOUR ASTEROID GOODBYE!– coupled with brevity–AMY’S NUDE ROMPS IN JAIL.

The Getty headline isn’t a real tabloid headline. There’s no wit, no play on words, and it’s way too long–it’s what an ad agency clone with Koolhaas glasses thinks is a real grabber.

Christopher Reynolds wrote about the ad in the LA Times and tried to think funny, but missed by a mile.

FBLA is nothing if not simple and brutal and brutally simple. We are simple in our brutality and brutal in our simplicity:

NAKED MEN! WILD PIGS! NOW AT THE GETTY!

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