While walking through what I think of as my secret galleries in the American Art Museum, I was arrested by a series of nudes by Kenyon Cox. Something between Manet’s breakfast heresies, classical/traditional nineteenth century nudes, and Pre-Raphaelite romanticism. I couldn’t call them great paintings. They weren’t great paintings – certainly not equal to those predecessors – but inexplicably arresting. And I can’t deny that my interest – my affection – for these nudes was not just aesthetic, but also erotic.

After seeing those paintings, I wandered over to the painting conservation studio where you could watch the conservators work through glass walls. Despite being the painting conservation studio, the only item being worked on was a life sized neo-classical statue of a young woman. A conservator was crouched down, rhythmically brushing below the statue’s right knee with a soft brush. It must be a gift to be able to work in the arts, I thought to myself. I also reflected that it was nice that her co-worker, working on a computer not a painting nor sculpture, flashed me a pretty smile. Less happily, I wondered if they might actually be grad students with little hope for real and decent paying job in the field due to the sequester (recently) and general disinvestment in the arts (long term trend).

The artistic vocation is a bit of unicorn now, isn’t it? Art, including literature, is undervalued and we are no longer taught to appreciate it. Even worse, we are no long taught to engage with it.

I’m going to praise Taylor Swift, here. I know. Crazy, huh? But not for her music. God, no. But for withdrawing from the streaming service Spotify. Services like that teach us that artistic production has no value to the consumer. Swift formally said f–k you, my work has real monetary value and Spotify is not valuing it. That’s worth something.

I used to regularly attend the Sunday concerts at the National Gallery of Art. Usually they were some small group – a quartet or a duo (piano and voice; flute and guitar; harpsichord and violin; etc) – playing a mixture of older classics and some modern composers or off the beaten track.

This one was lured me in because it mentioned Marais, who was a great seventeenth and eighteenth century composer for the viol de gamba. But though they played a piece by Marais (and it was, of course, fantastic), they mostly played Scottish and northern European pieces and the combination was… eclectic. Frankly, I unsatisfied. I didn’t cohere for me. The mixture of Shetland reels, Greensleeves, and French composers from the Baroque was like a poorly curated exhibit, especially because little effort was made to explain to us (the audience) how the pieces made up a single program, beyond the simply fact of just being played together.

On the other hand, they have a nice exhibit of El Greco paintings. Mostly, they are paintings from the National Gallery’s permanent collection and some paintings from nearby museums (Dumbarton Oaks in DC and the Walter in Baltimore). Nothing spectacular, curation wise, but it’s just nice to see a bunch in one place.

Friday night was ‘Hirshhorn After Hours,’ which we went to four years ago. We loved it and I’ve kept checking for it, but this the first time I’ve seen it come back.

It was done for the opening of two exhibitions, Days of Endless Time and The Hub of Things. The former is a new exhibition of video installations and the latter was a somewhat disappointing curation of art from the existing collection.

The Hub of Things is advertised as a fresh look at some of the best works from the collection, but the selection and arrangement and overall curation just didn’t make any sense to me. I expect an exhibit to be something beyond ‘hey look at this cool stuff,’ but for me, this didn’t rise above that.

Days of Endless Time was cool, though. The first two installations were very affecting, especially the very first one, which featured a cellist with her back to us playing on an impossibly green plateau among the Swiss Alps. When she played, the sound echoed back, sometimes nearly perfectly, what she just played. The description of the piece (Su-Mei Tse’s L’Echo) talked about ‘the sublime.’ As soon as I saw that word – sublime – it really clicked. It’s a very Romantic vision of the sublime. Think of Wordsworth visits to the Alps or the Swiss born Rousseau’s (who is really the link between the Enlightenment and the Romantics) book about his walks or also Kant’s idea of the sublime (the noble sublime and the beautiful sublime; not really the terrifying sublime, in this case).

The singer Zola Jesus played outside. Unfortunately, there really wasn’t any dancing, but I liked her music. It was sort of the bastard child of Faith and the Muse and the Cranes playing a combination of Tori Amos covers and gothic noise musical settings of the final, scribbled ramblings of a poisonously suicidal Taylor Swift.

Also, there was done objection to the wearing of my super awesome Speed Racer t-shirt. But then a security guard walked up to me and yadda yadda I sang the Speed Racer theme song and there was general agreement that my super awesome Speed Racer t-shirt is super awesome.