A Museum I'd Like to Visit

Today's Long and Short ReviewsLong and Short Reviews question is a difficult one for me to answer tactfully. What museum would I like to visit?

Oh well there's always something good at the dear old Smithsonian. There is so much of the Smithsonian. You could browse around there for a week, and something there would be deeply pleasing to have seen or heard. 

And, when visiting another town, it's always nice to visit the museum. There may or may not be much in it and what's in it may not leave much of an impression, but usually even the most pretentious and obnoxious "modern artists," even the ones who show their insecurity about copying traditional religious images by dumping garbage over their sculptures or inking mustaches on their Madonnas, manage to paint or sculpt or collect something that at least bemuses the eye. Sometimes small-town art museums do full displays of the work of some dear little pre-grandparent who's taken an art course to pass the time while the children went to school. Sometimes, whatever the shortcomings of the pre-grandparent's works, they're more charming than whatever the latest craze in New York might be. 

In the town of Wise, Virginia, there's a little gallery that specializes in displaying the best work of local college students, I always like to go there, especially with out-of-town guests. The students' work tends to be surprisingly good.  

But I have to say that, when I think about travelling, I think about natural phenomena I'd like to see in real life, wildlife, or people I'd like to spend time with, even research I'd like to do at libraries. I do not think about museums. I'm not yearning to see the Louvre, or the Victoria & Albert. If I had a valid reason to be in Paris or London I'd want to see their famous museums while there, but I wouldn't go to the cities to see the museums, and I'd want to save the museums for very cold or wet days. 

I feel about art the way I feel about poetry. When people just do what pleases them, the result usually pleases me too. When they've been stuffed full of notions, especially about the deconstructionist school and the need to shock the bourgeois and eschew what is "merely pretty," the result is usually just plain tacky. I don't like pretentiousness in art or poetry. I call my own poetry Bad Poetry (TM) and usually aim for comic rather than "serious," "High Art" effects. I like unpretentiousness in other people's art and poetry, too. If you paint a piece of plywood bright red and glue one grain of sand to it, as the hero of a comic novel I used to like did, you get an A for creativity in thinking of an art project at the last minute, but there is no way I'd buy it to hang on a wall--even in place of a paint-by-numbers piece rendered by someone else's grandchild. If anything I'd be more likely to shell out ten dollars for the paint-by-numbers piece.