“A museum setting might sterilize the dread of the inevitable ending at which any chronological exhibit explicitly in conversation with environmentalism must arrive. But the accessibility of this juxtaposition right up front makes sure one is clued into that inevitability and made to feel it violently.”
“Walking through French Baroque palaces-turned-museums and pushing through crowds at the New York Met is a traditional, storied cultural method of viewing Great Masters hanging in gilded frames on the walls. Walking into the Monet room at the Chichu Art Museum in Naoshima, Japan, however, is more like visiting a shrine.”
“Perhaps we must accept that we are simply watchers of beautiful forms. And if we acknowledge that we are observers, bound by our own frailties and limitations, we may be able to rescue the memory of what was, for an instant, exquisite.”
“One afternoon, Dorothy Cochran—New Jerseyite, artist, septuagenarian, self-described pied piper—was walking through the Montclair Art Museum, where she has been teaching a printmaking class since 2010.”
