Should the frame be recognized as an art form?

When I worked in an art gallery in Union Square in SF, we had a client coming in from China to look at an original Chagall. The problem: the crate was arriving from Switzerland only an hour before the client. When it got there we raced to unpack everything. The piece was huge - the extremely ornate gold frame must have weighed 80 pounds. And there was a stray nail sticking out of it! We only had a few minutes so I laid it down flat on the floor and unscrewed the back to take out the art.

I'll never forget the feeling - when I lifted the canvas out of the frame, it was as light as air. All those millions for this piece and it could have floated out of my hands. It was a beautiful feeling I've never forgotten.

We got the nail out out of the frame, patched it up, put the art back in, and sweated through the client viewing. They bought it, of course. It wasn't even that great of a painting. But somehow the framing adds so much to the aura of the piece. It's more than an art form to be honest - for most art out there it's the one thing that adds weight. For art that is valued at whatever someone will pay for it... the framing is everything.

I have an ornate frame hanging on my wall. I picked it up for like thirty bucks at a used furniture shop. It’s a big chunk of molded plastic with gilt paint here and there on it, and it frames an empty space on the wall.

Or, more precisely, it frames the empty space on the wall that my projector is aimed at. And it has a special power: everything displayed in it is, most assuredly, Art, because why would there be a frame around it otherwise?

With this simple act, I have settled the “are video games art” debate forever.

My brother is an artist who has invested a big chunk of his career in getting the technical details right. He does a fair amount of carpentry and his frames are amazing. Very simple "four pieces of wood" but the wood is straight, the box is deep and sealed, the corners are tight, the "glass" is typically coated plexi, and the piece is mounted within at the proper proportions. I personally consider them art on par with some of the pieces they contain.

When I was a kid my grandparents still lived in the house where my mom grew up - a huge, old, beautiful home (built in the '20s, I'd guess?) deep in a forest. When it was torn down to build condos (to pay my grandfather's debts, I'm told) one of the things we were able to keep was the handmade crown molding. My wife took a few pieces to a carpenter which they used to create a frame for an original painting we had purchased (online, but directly from the artist as I understand - from a daily-deals style art site called artsumo, anyone remember that?) It's probably my favorite piece of art in our home.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/pm5gECPMQEecAMf88

Shameless plug, but if you ever need to crop out the frame/surroundings of a bunch of photos of art: https://artsy.github.io/blog/2014/09/24/using-pattern-recogn...

I taught myself framing earlier this year for some antique maps that I own, and it is surprisingly hard. Cutting the passe-partout, the glass, picking the right kind of frame, getting the proportions right. Even something simple as getting 45 degree corners is really really difficult as the required precision is really high. In the end I did some decent ones that I'm happy with, but I'm still a one-trick pony with the (basic) materials that I used. Love working with my hands though, and it saves a bit of money compared to getting it done professionally.

How could it not? https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/holy-family-known-as-the-d...

Putting aside philosophical discussions around what art is, I feel like frames are much like many other things recognized as art in museums, including Smithsonian museums.

While four pieces of wood would suffice for security, frame makers delighted in the gilded and polychrome curves of Baroque frames, the asymmetrical Rococo peak and the stepped geometry of Art Deco casing.

You can say the same things about furniture or even fashion. Not every frame is art, sure, but you also won't see a Raymour & Flannigan sofa in a museum any time soon either.

Yes, there's a reason people specialize in framing and can charge a lot of money for their talent. It's both a skill and an art.

Is this seriously what constitutes an article premise these days for the smithsonian?

frames are like file extensions