in yesterday’s blogpost celebrating the met’s unimagined acquisition of the charles le brun jabach portrait, thom campbell, the museum’s newish director, asserts that “great works of art hold history, beauty and the poetry of time.” coming from a museum director, this is standard trope.
yet i kept rereading his post an unhealthy number of times, a compulsion not unlike the times i have to clap every time the plane i’m in lands, a primordial gloating, perhaps, for the persistence of my existence.