My wife and I spent Valentines Day afternoon at the New Britain Museum of Art, a small gem of culture about 10 minutes from Hartford, CT. We were there to take in the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit, which was fascinating, although I could have done with more large colorful posters and fewer small black and white sketches. At the end of the visit, I followed Mrs. on the obligatory brief visit to the museum’s gift shop where, of all places, I was reminded that golf, no matter the rumors of its imminent demise, remains a popular symbol of a content retirement.
Buyers for museum gift shops are suckers for any products that have an art theme. And they are smart, from a merchandising standpoint, to always throw a few cheap products in amidst the overpriced art catalogs and reproduction objets d’art. (Better to have the customers walk away with something, even if it
adds only a few pennies to the museum coffers.) A package of breath mints, part of a series of tins produced by a group called The Unemployed Philosophers Guild, caught my eye –- as satirical representations of famous works of art tend to do. (Mona Lisa winking is one of my favorites.) This tiny tin of “RetireMints” (clever) showed Grant Wood’s famous painting American Gothic –- you know, the stoic looking farmer couple facing ahead, a pitchfork in his hand. Except in the Philosophers Guild’s three-inch square version, Mr. Farmer is holding a metal golf driver.
A golf club was really the only harmonious choice for the revisionists at the Unemployed Philosophers Guild. Consider other aspects of an active retirement -- boating, walking the treadmill in a fitness center, doing laps in a pool –- and how difficult they would be to represent in such a compact painting. Sure, Mr. Farmer could have held a tennis racket upright in the painting but, really, does anyone over the age of 60 play tennis anymore?
Golf is still the de facto symbol of an active retirement, and as long as it remains so, rumors of its death will remain a FigMint.
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The Philosophers Guild offers a wide array of mints that take advantage of the flexibility of the suffix “-ment.” Our favorites, besides the RetireMints, are the “EmpowerMints,” “EnlightenMints,” and “Anti-EstablishMints.” For the entire list of mints, check out http://www.philosophersguild.com/mints/ And if you are looking to mint a new life in a golf community, please contact us and we will be happy to assist you. Finding the right golf home is as much art as it is science.