Quick….if you had $120 million to spend on art, what would you buy?

This tantalizing question was raised by Holland Cotter, the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times art critic. The recent sale of one of Edvard Munch’s paintings, “The Scream”, for that price prompted Mr. Cotter to muse on what he would purchase if so endowed with cash.

His answer was “no” to the Munch and “yes” to an “encyclopedic mini-museum for the same dollars”.

What art would I buy if that windfall came my way? My taste runs to classical, calm and modern art. I don’t like screaming in my art, even though I understand that the purpose of some art is to scream very loudly.

Paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud would be on my shopping list. A supersize Claus Oldenberg sculpture for the yard would be lovely as well. When shopping for art, $120 million isn’t hard to spend.

Fortunately, I am in complete agreement with Holland Cotter when he concludes his article with these words:

“Personally I love ideas as much as objects, not that I can separate them: I feel ideas are as sensuous as things.

What I collect are experiences-traveling, seeing, being there, anywhere. For me “The Scream” will always mean the memory of a moody Oslo twilight from decades ago. The value of that experience to me is beyond price. When I hear $120 million, I think of how many experiences, for how many people, that might have bought.”

My husband suggested I write this blog, proving that he has a good sense of humor and that I don’t tell stories without permission.

My guy works hard to keep current on all things techie. Every week he writes programs, creates websites, reads technical literature and fixes numerous ailing computers. He is a man of the times.

Imagine his chagrin when he recently pulled out his phone and a young relative spontaneously exclaimed, “Why you have an antique cellphone.”

While not being the type to stand out all night in front of an Apple store to be first with the latest  electronic wonder, he didn’t think of his gadgets as being “antique” either. He does now.

Last week, it was my turn to have an antiquarian moment. I was spending the day with 100 middle schoolers doing an art class on Maria Sibylla Merian, an amazing 17th century German artist who did splendid natural science drawings of insects. I brought a deck of butterfly cards, beautiful photographs and descriptions of many of the world’s lepidoptera species.

“I don’t want you to be creative or imaginative today,” I warned them. “I want you to choose a butterfly card and try to draw it exactly.”

I feared they would work fifteen minutes and call their drawings complete. But to my delight, almost none of the students were finished when the allotted time was up. Now I had a dilemma. They could not finish their work without the photos, and I needed to take the cards with me for a program in another school.

“I guess I will have to make some color copies, “I lamented,” and we all know that colored ink costs as much as French champagne.”

Their classroom teacher didn’t miss a beat. “Go to your lockers and get your cellphones,” she ordered. There was a mass exodus to the halls. The kids returned and photographed their butterfly cards. Problem solved, 21st century style.

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Venus has been putting on a spectacular show lately. Glance up and planet number two stands out in the night sky like the Kohinoor Diamond.

Venus’ exceptional brilliance recently caused a pilot to think he was headed for a crash with an oncoming plane. He abruptly dropped altitude tossing his passengers around the cabin like popcorn. Before judging him too harshly, consider these words by the award winning science journalist, Dava Sobel, in her 2005 book, The Planets…..”the planet’s dazzle mimics the landing beam of an oncoming airplane, even triggers police reports of unidentified flying objects.”

The brilliance that tricked the pilot is caused by sunlight that bounces off Venus’ dense and toxic cloud cover. Eighty percent is bounced off compared to 8 percent off our dusty moon.

The clouds that cause the radiance also turn the planet into a seared wasteland with rocks resembling the embers of a fire. Day and night temperatures hover above 800 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than Mercury, the first planet from the sun. Soaring in layers fifteen miles high, the clouds block the sun during the day and the stars and planets at night. It’s a perpetual gloaming and the greenhouse effect on steroids. If  the above isn’t dismal enough, the clouds also produce constant sulphuric acid rain which evaporates before it strikes the ground.

Venus’ atmosphere is also diabolical. Consisting of 97 percent carbon dioxide, the Venus “air” weighs on the terrain with 90 times the pressure of earth’s atmosphere. Between 1970 and 1984 the Russians landed ten spacecraft on Venus. After an hour of picture taking and measuring, each melted in the heat or was crushed by the pressure which is comparable to 3,000 feet below sea level.

Venus goes her own way, the only planet to rotate to to the west as she travels eastward around the sun with the other planets. The sun rises in the west. And she is a lazy spinner: one Venus day equals 243 Earth days. The Venus year is shorter than its day, 224.7 Earth days.

Every geographic feature on Venus except one is named after a woman either real or mythological. I sincerely hope this is not an editorial statement on my gender….beautiful, but deadly.

Garrison Keillor astutely said that there is essentially only one cell phone conversation: “I’m here now, and I’ll be there then!”

It doesn’t take a lot of eavesdropping to know he’s right on target. For that matter, you don’t even have to eavesdrop. We are all constantly barraged with other people’s cellular conversations. Or, more correctly, half of their conversations. We have become a nation of inadvertent voyeurs.

Garrison could add a corollary to “I’m here now, and I’ll be there then”……””I’m here now, and what do you want me to buy?’ I frequently hear that scenario acted out in grocery aisles by perplexed shoppers phoning their spouses for advice on dinner selection.

I try to use my cellphone sparingly and with a minute’s reflection. For instance, do I really need to tell my husband that I’m leaving the grocery store and will be home in 20 minutes? My guy will know I’m home when my car pulls into the garage. When did we start reporting our lives instead of living them? We are like uber tourists who photograph everything and see nothing.

I recently came across a  truckload of brand new end of season shoes that had been donated to Goodwill. A lady was standing in the shoe aisle rapidly phoning every friend she knew. “Quickly, what are all the shoe sizes in your family?”, she would ask. This amazing woman could note sizes and simultaneously load her shopping cart with a mountain of footwear.

I found that to be one of the truly rare, inspired uses of a cell phone. And she didn’t even say, “I’m at Goodwill now and I’ll be home in an hour.”