Nothing gold can stay

Don't even ask about the things that aren't gold.

“In May this past year, the director of Florence’s Uffizi, Eike Schmidt, announced a proposal to return a number of the museum’s religious paintings to churches (if not to the exact ones the paintings came from, then at least to similarly Christian places of worship).” I don’t agree with everything in this Alex Kitnick piece on museums (is “revoking the experience of modernity that has descended upon these paintings” so terrible?) but I do find his suggestion of “the possibility of a productive alienation, a salutary anti-immediacy” useful.

And it’s interesting to think about that idea when reading this piece on the Frick’s temporary move to the Breuer, which puts the artworks in a starkly different context.

The backdrop is gray, the lighting sober. No barriers. No protective glass. No descriptive texts. (And no selfies, either—as at the mother ship, at Frick Madison photography is banned too.) New York’s most majestic Bellini, most lavish Rembrandt, most sharply cut Ingres have been u…