One of these decades I really must sort out how to put pictures up on my blogs. It's easy. It must be. Everyone else does it without apparent catastrophe. And how can I be doing a culture blog without making use of this elementary procedure, to illustrate my profound opinions? No doubt for several weeks, months or years you will be able to witness my answer.

In the meantime, these people seem to know how to display pictures. Try going here, and clicking on the picture to the right.

This kind of electronic picture displaying is only in its infancy. For consider this. One of the consumer toys now doing the Price Plummet is none other than the flat screen TV.

I've been pondering this, and I think we are about to witness something very interesting, domestic-decoration-wise.

Who says you only have to have one TV screen per room?

I can remember when it was assumed that you could only have one TV screen per house. Then, some brave soul said to himself, and more to the point to his pestilential teenage children: you know what, you brats can have your own TVs in your bedrooms, then we can all watch what we want.

But now with these flat screen TVs, we can soon have them hanging on our walls in great assemblages. If a really good flat screen TV cost £50 instead of a minimum of about a £1,000, I'd have a couple on my living room wall, where the print-outs of my digital photos now go. And since the market for these gizmos is going to be absolutely huge beyond belief, they'll probably be down to £20 in no time at all.

For years I missed the point of these things. I used to think: So? They save a bit of space? I can now put a bit of crap behind my TV screen and a bit more crap behind my computer screen. A total of about fifty books or so. But this is totally to miss the point, which is that a flat screen is a completely different and infinitely more flexible object. It's not that it saves space. It's that it doesn't take up any more space in the first place, except wall space. It's a replacement not only for your pregnant TV and computer screens. It's a replacement for all you pictures.

I will buy one and sort out how to display pictures (mine and Michelangelo's) on it, and who knows what else besides? Ultra favorite movies or movie scenes with the sound-track off? Silent movies? Then when they are really cheap, I'll turn my home into an art gallery. (Personal computers will have to learn how to control a hundred screens rather than just one, I think.)

Question: Will "art galleries" go the way of provincial repertory theatres when TV came along?

No. And I'll tell you all about why some other time.