Life Lessons in Das Neues Museum

Time in a world of living stone

I am not a museum guy. Give me an hour and a half, and I’m good. I can only absorb so much, and ideally, each work of art deserves a few hours all its own, with its history, and its context, and it.

For instance, after my main loves – writing and music – my interests in visual art go roughly architecture, sculpture and painting, in that order. My most fundamental visual interest is, I gotta admit, the human body, which is perhaps the greatest creation – of whose, we’re not sure, but still…

I like paintings, but am rarely moved by them, with a few exceptions. I once spent a stoned, and exceptionally rewarding, 70 minutes completely immersed in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1905) in the Museum of Modern Art, when I lived in New York. Immobilized by the combination of cannabis and creation, it was a revelation, my body frozen as my eyes moved constantly around the painting, gradually seeing its internal rhythms, and its own movement, and it gave me a vastly better sense of what a …