Painting I / Display and the Exhibition as Part of the Work
Practice question · Fill in the blanks

Complete the account of display.

The usual convention places the ______ of the work at about 150 centimetres from the floor. Light exposure is counted cumulatively in ______-hours, which is why a work shown twice as brightly reaches its limit in half the time. Dimensions on a label are given ______ before width. Duchamp webbed the First Papers of Surrealism in 1942 with a mile of ______.

Word bank: centre · lux · height · string · top edge · depth

Hints
  1. The first blank is measured to the middle of the picture, not to a fitting.
  2. The third blank is the dimension that comes first in every catalogue.
Show the answer

The usual convention places the centre of the work at about 150 centimetres from the floor. Light exposure is counted cumulatively in lux-hours, which is why a work shown twice as brightly reaches its limit in half the time. Dimensions on a label are given height before width. Duchamp webbed the First Papers of Surrealism in 1942 with a mile of string.

Why

The third blank looks like pedantry and is not. Reversing the two numbers turns a portrait format into a landscape one in every catalogue, website and loan form that copies the label, and the error propagates for decades because nobody re-measures a work they have not seen.

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