All the Beauty in the World

With experience I’m coming to know that some works of art reward long looking while others give back less, and you often can’t guess at the outset which will be which.

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

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.

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 gr

a bare concrete corridor where signs warn: Yield to Art in Transit.

I strain to use my eye as an investigatory tool—as a pencil, with my mind the sketch pad. I am not very skilled at it, which means that I can get better. I look for meaning in the way people wear their clothes and carry their weight, hold hands with their boyfriends and girlfriends or don’t, style their hair, cut their beards, meet or avoid my eye,

I was more than a bit blinded by the bright lights. But it’s very hard, when you’re in a good light—“Where did you say you work? The New Yorker?!”—to accept that it isn’t you; it’s just light.

Monet, I realize, has painted that aspect of the world that can’t be domesticated by vision—what Emerson called the “flash and sparkle” of it, in this case a million dappled reflections rocking and melting in the waves. It is a kind of beauty that the old masters seldom could fit into their symbolic schemes, a beauty more chaotic and aflame than ou

If you want to know if something is funny, see if it makes you laugh. If you want to know if a painting is beautiful, see if it evokes an equivalent response, one as definite as laughter though usually quieter and shyer to emerge. I step up to a landscape painting called Vétheuil in Summer, close enough that it swallows my field of vision. I find t