What do you look for in a museum?

From the New York Times: At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap, but Few Stay to Focus, by Michael Kimmelman:

...[T]ourists now wander through museums, seeking to fulfill their lifetime’s art history requirement in a day, wondering whether it may now be the quantity of material they pass by rather than the quality of concentration they bring to what few things they choose to focus upon that determines whether they have “done” the Louvre. It’s self-improvement on the fly.

I've always had a hard time going to galleries with other people. I like to go at my own particular pace. Sometimes I want to spend a long time with pieces that draw me in, and other times, I just want to whirl through. I'm not very adventuresome in my artistic tastes. I was one of those freshman college kids who had Monet posters on her wall, and it took me years to appreciate Picasso and Pollack. These days, I still gravitate toward the Italian Renaissance artists.

Bede and I are pretty fortunate in that our ways of visiting galleries are compatible. When we went to Italy for our honeymoon, we realized that the Uffizi gallery in Florence was so overwhelming that we would have to find a focal point in order to be able to begin to appreciate the treasures before us. That was when we decided to look out for Mary Magdalene in art. I wrote about this "I Spy" exercise four years ago in the blog post Magdalene in Florence and Rome.

What about you? How do you experience art? Do you prefer the ajoining gift shop? Growing up outside of Washington, D.C., my favorite gift shop was the one in the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of American History because of its fabulous collections of paper-dolls. The Smithsonian Natural History museum's gift shop was great, too, because of all the stones and bones.

The Daily Me: truth, and that other thing

From a New York Times opinion piece by Nicholas D. Kristof, called The Daily Me*:


...the public is increasingly seeking its news not from mainstream television networks or ink-on-dead-trees but from grazing online.

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.

Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves.

That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

I can relate. While I still avoid media sources that employ ad hominem attacks, I'm working to develop more of a discerning filter that says, "Wait a minute, this sounds too good to be true" or "Now, where did you get those statistics?"

For the past couple of years, I've subscribed to FactCheck.org, a non-partisan service that scrutinizes how political speeches and statements stand up to careful research and documentation. As a storyteller, I strive to find the truth in fiction. As a voter and a tax-payer, I really want just the facts, even if they don't coincide with what I wish were true.

*This article may require you to set up a New York Times profile account, which is free. If you don't want to go through the set-up process, email me off-blog and I'll email a copy of the article to you.