MargenNobody brags about having «done» fifteen deep conversations in one afternoon. With museums, though, we do exactly that: forty rooms, two hundred works, six hours, ruined feet, and in the memory barely a blurry postcard.
There is another way, and it is almost free: go in to see a single work. Choose it beforehand, the way you arrange to meet someone. Sit down in front of it —there are benches: they are a clue— and stay ten, twenty minutes, until what always happens happens: first the boredom, then the detail, then the question, and at last that wordless conversation which is the only serious way of looking.
A painting seen like that stays with you for years. Two hundred seen in passing evaporate in the lobby.
It works for museums and it works for almost everything: attention is not shared out, it is given whole. Fewer rooms. More bench.