As if a $220 million makeover weren’t sufficient, the Frick Assortment in New York Metropolis has enlisted comic Steve Martin to advertise the newly reopened museum, which returned to its Fifth Avenue headquarters this spring.
In a brand new video posted to the Frick’s web site and social media, the Solely Murders within the Constructing co-creator and actor prances across the freshly renovated Gilded Age mansion, narrating a brief historical past of the museum and its originator, the industrialist and infamous labor suppressor Henry Clay Frick.
“Consider what you or I might be drawn to on any given day at the Frick Collection,” Martin begins within the six-minute video. “Maybe it’s a gilded beard,” he suggests, because the digital camera pans to seize the luxurious facial hair of a Fifteenth-century Hercules sculpture.
“This is what the Frick Collection is for: for slowing down, following your eye, and getting closer to objects of beauty and awe that are always right here, waiting for us behind these historic doors,” Martin says in drawn-out, inflected sentences. (The class of “us,” in fact, is restricted to those that can drop $30 on a museum go to.)
A Frick spokesperson informed Hyperallergic that Martin was an excellent match as a result of he’s “a longtime member and fan” of the museum in addition to “an iconic figure in New York City.” It’s additionally value mentioning that the actor is a seasoned artwork collector. Martin as soon as described amassing as his “biggest hobby,” partially as a result of work are so completely different from his chosen vocation. His personal assortment reportedly contains works by Picasso, Francis Bacon, and Roy Lichtenstein, and he additionally authored a 2010 novel set within the modern artwork world.
Martin might or will not be probably the most becoming selection for the face of the Frick, however his expertise fixing museum heists because the clumsy Inspector Jacques Clouseau in The Pink Panther (2006) actually lends some ironic appeal to his newest starring position.
