hy go to a museum these days? The digital age, with its high-res images and thumbnail galleries, has put more masterpieces at our fingertips than one could ever hope to see in person in ten lifetimes. Within a few clicks you can be riffling through the 31,287 photographs stockpiled by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Or zooming in on 284 of the Italian Old Master drawings tucked away in the Blanton Museum of Art's temperature-controlled coffers. You can even “turn the pages” of the Harry Ransom Center's Gutenberg Bible.
But there's something about being within sneezing distance of the three-dimensional totems of our shared history that can't be replicated. So why go to a museum? For the physical, concrete experience that reminds us who we are—in space, in time, and in relation to others. Each work that we stand in front of was crafted, sculpted, whittled, or otherwise fashioned by someone who either walked this earth many moons before us or perhaps has interpreted a cultural moment in an illuminatingly different way than we have. We go to see but also to nudge ourselves into thought. We go to find a little magic, a moment of self-forgetfulness or of transport in the presence of something lasting.
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