Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of oral remarks delivered at The New Criterion’s gala on April 26, 2017 honoring Philippe de Montebello with the fifth Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society.
I’m reflecting today on a topic I have been discussing with my students at the Institute of Fine Arts, which is “art in conversation.” If you’ve looked at any work of art, you know that you don’t do it passively: you have a response. It can be disgust. It can be admiration. It can be delight. It can be any number of things, but it’s a response, which means that it is a conversation with the work of art. What’s more: when is the last time that you saw a work of art by itself? Works of art are also in conversation with one another, just as they converse with the viewer.
Works of art are in the company of other art works—unless you’re in a tokonoma, a special room outside of a Japanese tea ceremony in which one work is shown alone. And the meaning of a work and our response to it change depending on the company it keeps. The conversations are fluid. The conversations can change enormously the way a placementdoes. If you were to change two seats at your table and switch places, the dynamics of the conversation would be likely to change, and the same is true of
