¶ Never having visited the Barnes Museum, formerly in Merion, Pennsylvania and slated to reopen in Philadelphia, we were appalled by what we saw on the Times‘s virtual tour of several rooms, hosted by Randy Kennedy. It is shocking to think that the bad taste of a private collector has been respected for more than fifty years. Dr Barnes expressed his bad taste not in his collections of fine French paintings and African carvings but in the manner of displaying them, which, in our view, submerges them in unintelligible clutter while draining away the possibility of aesthetic pleasure. It is nothing less than barbaric to permit dead hands to interfere with the imaginative lives of the living.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 11th, 2011 at 8:00 pm.