ABOVE: detail of the Sir Samuel Room on the Queen Mary 2. Art collections aboard cruise ships are becoming increasingly elaborate and expensive.

“Being in a ship is like being in a jail,” the great Dr. Samuel Johnson once said, “with the chance of being drowned.” Why anyone would want to pay thousands of dollars to spend a week getting dysentery on a floating shopping mall and sleeping in a cabin the size (and temperament) of a bathroom stall is totally beyond us. Among the amenities cruise ship companies are now using to lure prey aboard their grimy decks are their art collections.

The Orlando Sentinel notes some of the biggies: Norwegian Cruise Lines’ Dawn has Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh, and Renoir on its walls; the collection aboard Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 is valued at about $5 million. Dollar figures appear frequently in the Sentinel’s piece, far more frequently than the artworks those dollars paid for, in fact—like so many news stories about art, it’s just another excuse to talk about impressive sums of money. What we want to know is: who in their right minds insures these works, perched, as they are, on the walls of enormous ocean-going chum buckets?

LINK: Orlando Sentinel (via SouthFlorida.com) > Extravagant art galleries at sea