leslie jamison asks what belongs in a museum.
…What belongs in a museum, anyway? An epic landscape painting, sure. A crib? A baby? A photograph of a crib and a baby? …Though we often understand art as representation, it actually operates through exclusion and distortion. Art changes the world—distills it, transforms it, and rejects it—in order to focus and electrify our attention. Beauty rises from what feels recognizable and faraway at once….Art asks us to briefly abandon our lives in order to come back with a changed gaze. It’s the daydream and the homecoming. The point is the residue; the fact that we have not left untouched.
— Leslie Jamison, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” New York Review of Books, 14 May 2020
Dylan said in his 1966; Playboy interview:
“Art, if there is such a thing, is in the bathrooms; everybody knows that. To go to an art gallery thing where you get free milk and doughnuts and where there is a rock-‘n’-roll band playing: That’s just a status affair. I’m not putting it down, mind you; but I spend a lot of time in the bathroom. I think museums are vulgar.”
In “Visions of Johanna” he wrote: Inside the museums infinity goes up on trial.”
I agree.
Great quote! That’s from the Nat Hentoff interview?
Some of those new museum bathrooms are pretty swank these days.
Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues….