From The New York Times:
Time gets special consideration today. We sweep out the old and ring in the new, take stock, dust off some of those perennial resolutions and maybe even formulate one or two new ones. Depending on your age and the way things have been going lately, this annual rite is not necessarily easy. So take refuge in art. There may be no better place — no place more stimulating or ultimately more comforting — to contemplate life’s forward motion than a large museum, especially the great time machine that is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met is closed today while most of us take a collective timeout for time, but — at least for now — there’s always tomorrow.
In a way it seems a trifle odd that artworks are such superb instruments of time travel. Time is not visual, after all, unlike space. And most works in museums are static, unchanging objects. And yet art is loaded and layered with different forms of time and complexly linked to the past and the present and even the future. The longer they exist the more onionlike and synaptic they become.
More here.
