In Which I View Art

I went to the city's art museum today. I usually thrill to art museums, and I am particularly fond of this art museum, because it is free, and because I believe a free art museum is a treasure without price, or at least without a price that I have to pay.

So I went.  But for the first time in as long as I can remember, I grew impatient.  Maybe it's because I had my family with me, and families are nothing if not destroyers of solitary joy.  At its best, an art museum is that singular combination of refuge and spaceship, harbor and port.  But maybe it only works like that, for me, if I am alone.

But maybe it's that I am middle-aged, and the middle-aged grow weary of trying to be people we are not.

Today, as I strolled around gazing at the art, reading the miniature disquisitions on intersections and interrogations and indictments and influence, all I could summon was irritation.  Does art-speak have to be so smug?  Have we really lost faith in the power of art to communicate without a varnish of insufferable prose?

I am glad, after all, that I did not enter academia.