Empty wine glasses

Philippa on Gopnik:

Blake Gopnik began a series in this morning's Washington Post on his experiment with "extreme connoisseurship," which entails looking at "a tiny corner of one work. If the art is really good, there will be at least a morning's worth of looking in a few square inches of it." In his first foray, he visits The Phillips Collection to look at the wine glasses on the table at the center of that collection's most famous work, "Luncheon of the Boating Party," by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Gopnik admits that, "It isn't how most of us look at pictures. It's not even how most critics or scholars get to look at art, most of the time. But give it a chance, and it's the best kind of looking there is."

Read the whole thing here.

I'll have to re-read the Gopnik piece, which at first reading just sounded like art jargon semantic kabuki to me. But a closed mind is just as bad, so I'll give it a try again. The WaPo readers' comments (as usual) are also precious!