Wednesday, December 24, 2008

There are four sides to everything


The idea of Museum Quality framing is a strange one. Museums often have in-house specialists who spend their time replicating the frames of paintings from the outside world. Come to think of it all works come into museums from the outside world and most of them are framed when they enter. We’ve even seen museum replicas of those slender aluminium frames that artists used to put around big abstract works in the seventies. Maybe it refers to museum quality, non-reflecting glass. While the effect is certainly impressive, the expense usually puts it way beyond the amount people who use framing shops are prepared to spend. Chances are ‘museum quality’ has become another brand attribute: the sort of quality you expect to find in museums whether they are responsible for it or not.