Philosophy

The philosopher at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

I am now a proud member of the Met. I went 6 times while I was in New York last week, even used the earphones.

It's good to have some pieces of the Met in my head -- not just individual works, but clusters, rooms, groups of pieces that illuminate each other. A few pieces try to be philosophically provocative, but the greater treat for someone trained to watch how people construct their own languages to say what they want to say is that one can see in these works the ways that srtists respond to each other, incorporate each other's tricks, qualify each other's messages, build a particular statement within a context saturated with meaning.

A great museum is a teaching machine, taken one way -- a thinking machine, taken another way.