A couple of galleries away, there is a series of pictures Stieglitz made of his partner and later his wife, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. They aren’t portraits, and they aren’t snapshots. Studies, I suppose you’d call them: efforts to see her better—her hands, her feet, her torso, her breasts, her face, her face again, her face again. She was

Georgia O’Keeffe here, as a work of art, has virtues the rest of us appear to lack. She is still. She is permanent. There’s a frame around her, putting space between her sacred beauty (an older meaning of the word sacred is “set apart”) and the profane, mundane world. I think that sometimes we need permission to stop and adore, and a work of art

I stroll over to the side of the temple to examine the relief carvings. I find the pharaoh—he’s not hard to spot—wearing the dual crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. I wonder who among my fellow onlookers knows that there’s something strange about this particular pharaoh. It isn’t his profile or regalia; those are conventional enough. It’s his name,

They say that the roots of a tree are every bit as extensive as the branches. The Met is like this, too, with two floors below the galleries exactly as endless as the areas the public knows. Talented guards have internalized the whole of it in three-dimensions, such that they can tell you outside of a basement restroom that Aztec deities are

This is an essential aspect of a work of art: you can’t empty it of its contents and patly move on. It seems to scorn a world where knowing a few bullet points about a subject is counted the least bit impressive.

high-altitude archaeologist Constanza Cerruti,

They say the same thing about the Mona Lisa: the more that people swarm her, the more poignant is her serene detachment. The effect is even more pronounced here, because the statue was designed to have a life independent of the viewer. It wasn’t made to be an art object. It was a machine for establishing Hatshepsut’s presence in the djet world.

Each morning, her priest would have opened her temple’s doors so that the limestone statue would catch the morning light. At that moment, she (the eternal Hatshepsut) would transform into an akh, a radiant being, in communion with her father, the sun. (More precisely, Amun-Re was the power that powered the sun, the invisible creative force behind

Unlike this businessman, unlike most people, I have no ball to push forward, no project to advance, no future I am building toward. I could work at this job for thirty years and I will make no progress, per se. The public will gain no surer sense of where the mummies or the toilets are. They’ll continue to ask me for King Tut’s tomb, and they won’t