Have you ever thought about art museums?

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Have you ever thought about art museums? I think about art museums a lot. As a freelancer, I have a lot of time on my hands during weekdays. Sometimes I use that time go to art museums, which is nice because they're usually not very full in the middle of the week.

Lately I've found myself even more drawn to art museums. They're calm, quiet, and full of these enduring objects that don't seem to be touched by the chaos of the outside world. You can reliably go back to a museum and see the same painting or sculpture in more or less the same place, month after month. Seeing those objects in their homes is like visiting old friends who you only see once or twice a year. You get a rare whiff of permanence.

Well, "you don't know what you've got til it's gone," as Joni Mitchell sang.

Now that the world has changed, you can't go to art museums. The Met closed, MoMA closed, all the Smithsonian museums have closed. So now, with all the time in the world and everyone else marooned in a similar limbo, we can't even have access to those calm, quiet spaces. Even in the past few days I've had the impulse to check what exhibitions are on and head out for an afternoon. Then it went from probably a bad idea to an actual impossibility.

In my 'rona dreams we're all slowly pacing around sunlit galleries looking at Impressionist paintings of gardens and trees and lakes, reminding us that time goes on regardless. Most things besides art are impermanent. Oh yeah and still keeping at least one meter apart from all other humans.