A single painting
What excavation means
A single painting. When I was about nineteen, a friend told me that’s all he went to museums for, to sit in front of a single painting—it could be any painting—until something happened, then he’d leave. The thing was to pay attention. I tried it at the Art Institute in Chicago that summer. Up the stairs, around a corner, “Excavation” by Willem de Koonin…
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