Sentence of the Day

Michael Kimmelman on Philippe de Montebello stepping down after 30 years of directing the Metropolitan Museum of Art: "Any old Monet show will inflate the numbers [of visitors to the Met] without necessarily adding to the sum total of human understanding."

Wow. Now that's a tough standard.

Librarians collect the artifacts of human attempts at understanding, and in so doing build up the storehouse.  Kimmelman's talking about museums, our sisters in this enterprise.

But, honestly, what I'm most interested in are personal attempts to leave the world a better place, in ways that no library or museum could ever show.  Adding to the sum total of human understanding is just as worthy a cause, and just as hard to achieve, in our private lives.

Comments

[Wevbo]

Marcus,

Is there a way to add to the sum total of human understanding other than through the creation of works of art?

I feel that most understanding comes with the distillation of works of art. It's why "poetic" is used so frequently and incorrectly in popular culture. For example, the BBC's (then NYTimes') suggestion that Obama is poetry while Clinton is prose. It's as though any attempt, in any field, to do something new is understood automatically to be a creative act. Something new is added.

Benchmarks of the new are, in my opinion, what comprise the majority of art collections. We collect those cultural and historical moments when something new was initiated, and we preserve that moment and concretize our understanding of it by displaying them in public. "Beauty" seems, to me, to be the single quality in what endures, and the representation of one sterling example of that beauty is what we display.

Art allows us moments of communion. We can come together and find common purpose in those moments of unity. Across culture, ethnicity, politics, etc. Even the supreme and terrible beauty of nature, when it destroys something or some peoples, in a huge and spectacular and inexplicable manner, stuns us and brings us together.

Obama's rhetoric is beautiful, but of the museum. He reminds us of FDR, JFK, MLK, and those moments of communion when we can together for great and terrible occassions. I want to believe in Obama, I think I do, but as Turd Blossom himself said so eloquently yesterday, Obama cannot yet close the deal.

Or, maybe art is empire. Maybe the new art is the power to repeat and manipulate images to jam-pack meaning beyond the ways that words can. Once a work of art starts to lose its power, it becomes representational and something we can all come together safely to admire. That reminds me of an article about Michael Jordan's 1999 comeback, from Harper's, which basically made the point that Americans can only love their sports heroes once they've seen them in decline, and thus seen them as human and mortal, just like us. We topple them, then venerate them for what they were. And we appreciate the reassurance of what we thought we previously understood: politicians are in the end just politicians, water lillies water lillies, shooting guards men.