This Blog Is Not About College

Yes!  This blog is not about college.  It is about art museums.

Are art museums good things?  They are places where the general public can come and admire embodiments of beauty and exemplars of human aesthetic accomplishment.  Visitors can view at least copies of the prides of their civilizations, and come within inches of milestones in history.  They can travel the world and learn about other cultures through what they consider beautiful, and about what they considered important enough to paint or sculpt, and what they thought worthy of special adornment.  Windows through time and space revealing human meaning hardly seems negative.

But one should consider the role these museums play in their societies.  The idea that one can compile a representative collection of beauty and place it between walls, under a roof, crammed between similar replicas, sounds rather less appealing.  Who gives these institutions monopoly over what is art?  Who can justify limiting beauty to man-made creations?  Who can truly say that placing opus beside opus beside opus does not diminish the impact of each one?  The quiet halls of museums stifle expressions of delight and emotion connection, while shepherding viewers from piece to piece with an air of cool, systematic appreciation.  Is it really a place to admire beauty – or just narrow collection granting its visitors the same narrow vision with the paradoxical air of “culture?”