How to View Art

Over at the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott has some advice on how to visit an art museum. Or so it seems. It's good advice, to be sure, both practical and insightful: take time, seek silence, study up, engage memory, accept contradiction.  But one quickly realizes that the art museum here is not just an art museum. It's also a metaphor for life. These are rules on how to live. That's the thing about museums: they make us realize that we are in the presence of something great, but also far beyond our understanding, and that our time is limited. How we spend that time makes all the difference.