Journey vs. Destination

In the Smithsonian Art Museum, we walked across the hallway, enchanted by a Rembrant painting of a light house.

Pure genius, poetry in paint; music and motion captured.

But, hey, so were the Serat, Pissaro, Cassatt, Turner… Even Monet’s paintings were pretty good, though I tend to like him less than other painters. (Yes, I recognize the idiotic hubris of calling Monet’s Water Lilies “pretty good”.) Footsore and weary, 5:15pm on Sunday of an epic museum weekend, we drifted quickly around the school of Rembrant room and didn’t bother going to the non-named 17th century Dutch painters room.

We’ve seen enough today.

Does collecting works of genius together diminish them? If the Cantor Center (small, free museum on Stanford campus) had one of these rooms, we’d be absorbed and thrilled for hours. But now? Enh. I’ve been in an avalanche of awesome and now I’m ready to dig out.

These paintings deserve better.

Each of these works of art deserve an audience that came for specifically to see it, not a drifter wandering aimlessly, cluelessly. Or, worse, a high school student assigned to view it and every other thing in this incredible city.

I’m saddened by my own lack of response.

There is so much to see. And in so many different fields: air and space (science! engineering!), gardens, architecture, art from every angle part of the world. It is like a smorgasbord, millions of dishes created by an army of thousands of chefs competing for a limited space in my heart and mind.

I’m afraid that I’m addicted to the easy sweetness of sugar.

Art can be difficult to understand. The best art is multilayered, far beyond the facile beauty. By having so much of it grouped together, it is hard to spend the time each piece deserves. Some of that goes back to opportunity cost where spending time with this piece means some other site (or sight) is missed. But it is also about exhaustion: when I’m tired I tend to eat junk food, listen to syrupy pop music and like easy art. I’m not proud of that part of myself. The enjoyment is all on the surface and I’d die of nutrition deprivation if that was all I had.

Does having so much art together shortchange it all?

I want to appreciate the more difficult (thought-provoking, interesting, challenging) art but, with such high volume, that is outside my reach. There is too much. Too much. TOO MUCH. I can’t even see it all let alone give it the attention it deserves. I spent most of the time viewing art I’d already seen in books (wow! look they have something I’m familiar with; yep, looks like it did in the print, bigger though).

Really great art is partially a reflection of the viewer.

I’m happy that we have good museums near home. My takeaway from this educational experience is the realization that I want to build a relationship with my visual arts. For example, take the gardens we go to a couple of times a year; I like to visit multiple times because the plants grow and change. I can’t afford the art I’d like to own. I don’t live in Washington DC and I’m not likely to move. (Ahahahahaahhaaa!) The Bay Area has some great museums and I already love the approachability of the Cantor Centor. I know I didn’t properly appreciate what I saw today in the National Gallery of Art. I’m a little embarrassed, actually. Luckily, I can go home and do a much better job of loving the incredible art near me now that I put more value in the right place.

We got an early start this morning. That was dumb.

None of the museums open until 10am so we rode the Metro, walked around the mall, saw the Washington Monument, visited the south lawn of the White House, and got very cold, all before hitting the Natural History Museum (dinosaurs!!).

As we were walking along the famous ellipse (well, I’d never heard of it but the hotel said it was famous, I don’t know why a flag football field is famous), on the map we saw another monument marked. I pointed over the trees to a shiny gold something on a pillar. That must be it and I didn’t need to walk to it.

C accused me of being jaded already. (It was about thirty minutes before the museums opened.) It was a little early still.

But he’s kind of right. I think maybe I got a little jaded in Virginia where the trees go from interesting to ubiquitous. The trees lost the awesome specialness when they became freeway-side weeds.

DC is so packed with (big red arrow pointing to amazing stuff!) activities that it is difficult not to feel jaded. Without uniqueness, the forest of museums is hard to appreciate. Even when in a museum, there is the chance that we could be at another museum seeing something more interesting.

It is a sort of opportunity cost with the risk being time and limited next or steps we can take before our feet give way. The rewards are things to learn and see, pictures to take, and new points to talk about.

I’m on vacation. I don’t want to worry about opportunity cost.