The Art of the Pilgrimage

This reading was based on how the way to view art has changed. It has changed a lot. Art may come to us too readily now. If we live in near cities with museums, little sacrifice may be required on our part to see it. It is seen as if art is not taking as serious as it uses to be. I mean most stuff you can find online now; there really is no need to go anywhere to go see anything. Even in the age of traveling art it is unlikely that this most riveting of all German Renaissance paintings will ever go anywhere, fortunately: it’s too big, too precious. To see art in its context is always useful-we forget how misleading it may be to confront a painting conceived for a specific chapel in Venice on the wall of, say a museum in Vienna or Paris-but that is a separate issue from Colmar and Grunewald. Art use to be a piece of gold long time ago. You would have to go through crazy thing to create art and also to go see it. People are not like that anymore. Lots of people are very lazy and just do whatever. We did lose something during the last century, although it was not, as Benjamin said, a craving for the original. It was a sufficient appreciation for the virtues of the pilgrimage. The Web and mass media flood everyone with the same images, and museums shuttle much of the same art from place to place.