Objects of Desire - The Met

When you’re in a museum like The Met, it’s hard to focus on one thing. Centuries and cultures spill over from room to room—you constantly have to reorient yourself to see the dark spaces and invisible lives between each work.

Beyond the work is the context in which you see it—inside of a museum itself older by two or three times the number of years you have lived, holding the spirit of millions of brief and nameless lives who’ve experienced it before you.

It makes sense then that in the face of unimaginable time an intrusive thought emerges: to push the statue, break the glass, to ensure this object that has travelled through time stops with you—to give yourself great and final meaning.