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2011-02-21 - 11:40 a.m.

Went to an art museum yesterday, a different one, and meandered through the photography exhibit, read almost everything the curators had written, and it was great. I love looking at photographs, of all kinds: street photos, sports photos, breaking-news stuff, even portraits. Somehow, the fact that they were recorded on film, and not a microchip, makes them more valuable, more deserving of attention. I care less for the high-art photos, but I think that's because you're supposed to care less about it. It's supposed to caress your head, not your heart. Still, I can look at even those, if they've got nice lines, good contrast, something on which to linger.

But, though we went for the photos, turns out something else is what stuck. Because, afterwards, walking through the rest of the big museum, walking through room after room of beautiful, old oil paintings, the fuzziness of all that stimulation settled and the lines got sharp. I'd seen those paintings, in that same museum, two or three times before. I'd seen all those Degas paintings that are obsessed with thirteen-year-old girls, all the Matisse stuff with the forever roundness of breasts, cheeks, asses. Even the Georgia O'Keefe. And then that one Picasso they have there, the sad, sad woman, pretty but who looks like she's underwater, looking down and to the right, at the shoes of the old guy standing next to you in the museum. And I thought: all this art is about either sex or sadness. If it's not about sex, maybe, it's about what happens when it's gone, and there is, in museums, no in between.

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