![]() It would be absurd to imagine a doctor lingering over one of these images between appointments, being interested in it or somehow attached to it, having his day inflected by it or whatever. ![]() ![]() These images of art address only the sick, the patients. If people were in fact moved, convincing themselves they discovered whatever they projected into the hackneyed poem, or better yet, if people felt the pressure to perform absorption in the face of what they knew was an embarrassing placeholder for an art no longer practicable for whatever reasons, a dead medium whose former power could be felt only as a loss-these scenarios did for me involve a pathos the actual poems did not, a pathos in fact increased in proportion to their failure, as the more abysmal the experience of the actual the greater the implied heights of the virtual. What is a museum guard to do, I thought to myself what, really, is a museum guard? On the one hand you are a member of a security force charged with protecting priceless materials from the crazed or kids or the slow erosive force of camera flashes on the other hand you are a dweller among supposed triumphs of the spirit and if your position has any prestige it derives precisely from the belief that such triumphs could legitimately move a man to tears. ![]() ‘Untitled,’ circa 1964 photograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard ![]()
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