It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself – a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha – to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.
Outside museums in noisy public squares people look at people. Inside museums we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind getting quiet to look at art.
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Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.
