Museums and galleries of the artworld

New York Times has gone down hill in the Trump era, but one positive step forward is a commitment to Art History. It suggests you stare at a painting for 10 minutes, and then it writes about it. This one is about Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.  Here's an interesting painting by  StevenBeercockArt   Reddit I wrote and pasted in a bunch of Maitreya statues on my spiritual blog . 

 

Random facts: 82 and 5th Avenue.  The Met doesn't have any Frida Kahlo paintings, but 5 Vermeers out of 34. It has 2 Agnes Martins and a photograph of her by Diane Arbus.  It is the largest museum in the USA, 5th in the world.  This one is in room 956: One of the people in the book club reports this podcast is good: Nate DiMeo - The Memory Palace, Met Residency. I didn't go one last time to the Ruben before it closed. What an utter disappointment that is to me that I didn't do that. I'm hoping to put that insight into going to museums now that I'm more activated.  I went 7/21/25, and room 111 with Hatshepsut was yet again denied to me. I talked to a nice guard who gave me a company answer as to possible reasons why.  I went straight for Iran and it didn't disappoint: Rumi illuminated book Read the plaque below: Feel like that was from Rostram epic, the poem  Shahnameh . I like the guy with many faces. I went through the near east, european painting, M...

Sometimes I get whiplash, going from Michelangelo to Alabama rugs. He brings those rugs to life, he's a good story teller. The museum is a hodgepodge of specifics and eras and geographical locations. In the city that is filled with people all over the world, there are artifacts from all over the world. If you like to travel but don't have the money, New York City is a good place to live. People from all over the world come to NYC and the museum is a small world of artifacts.  His definition of art is something more beautiful than it had a right to be. It's philosophically imprecise enough to work.  I didn't mind the personal digressions or the ins and outs of being a guard, he seems like a friendly guy, I think I would like him.  The big payoff at the end is he tells us his favorite which is Crucifixion by Fra Angelico ca. 1420–23 ( Met ). My uncle used to like an after dinner liquor named that. He's dead now, and we'd become estranged after he left my aunt, but...

  This simple search can't be all of them, I'm going to find more. There's a list on Letterboxd that has 112 films. Prince of Egypt, and Ten Commandments are the top two rated films on the list, but I've never heard of Pharaoh (1966) or Ra: The Path of the Sun God (1990). There seem to be a million Antony and Cleopatra movies, and Cleopatra movies.   I watched The Prince of Egypt. It's about Moses, so now I have two powerful narratives from the Abrahamic tradition about Egypt. 

"Mr. Abdullah stands about five foot five and carries himself like a prince. Practically every word he speaks is incisive and funny, though he rarely cracks more than a slight smile. Once, I was chatting with him when a visitor interrupted to ask about the source of Abdullah's evident accent. The chief deadpanned: "Washington Heights." The fuller answer, I find out, is Washington Heights by way of Iraq, with stopovers in several great world cities (Milan, London, Istanbul...). Now, of course, he lives in New York, where he moonlights as an adjunct professor of Islamic art history. I am interested to learn that he doesn't actually like New York very much-"all asphalt, all aggression," he tells me, "no warmth, no air, no sense of history; anything that is old and meaningful is torn down." When I object by pointing out that constant rebuilding and reinvention sort of is New York's history, Abdullah doesn't disagree. "Quite right,...