Monday, October 28, 2013

How to look at an art museum

“There's nothing worse than those vast galleries in which you lose yourself in a labyrinth of rooms, with no sense of how one area relates to another or how the whole relates to the landscape beyond.”
 

“The crucial thing is that the building serve the art. It's not a case of building only massive rooms and then having to find only massive art to fill them.”
 

“Of course, the best visual art is famously resistant to being explained. That's why it's visual - it taps into something that words can't get near. But there's a lot of fun to be had talking about what that something is.”
 

Justin Paton, who has just been appointed head of international art at the Art Gallery of NSW, nails his colours to the mast in the Sydney Morning Herald.