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I’m guessing that this stub from November 23rd, 2011 marks my second visit to the amazing Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, a pilgrimage I tend to make every time I’m in town.
Now, why would a guy want to visit the same museum over and over again, you may ask? Let me set aside the fact that you are asking this of a guy who saw The Tragically Hip almost thirty times, Phish over a hundred times, and has read To Kill A Mockingbird and Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy at least twenty times each, and address this particular situation head-on:
Aside from the fact that museums tend to keep a lot of their holdings in storage and rotate their on-the-wall offerings regularly, and the further fact that for less than twenty euros you are given access to approximately a billion dollars worth of art, well, there’s just so much to see at the Van Gogh Museum.
Frankly, there’s so much see in every piece that hangs in the Van Gogh Museum.
Every work of art is, well, a work of art. Every brush stroke is the stroke of a self-tortured, malnourished, rabid artist teetering on the edge of sanity who was endlessly trying to quench an unquenchable thirst for artistic perfection, or at least acknowledgement that he was on the right track. And every single piece is brilliant. Brilliant enough to build a good argument that Van Gogh achieved his goal of perfection several times over, while his biography proves definitively that the lack of acknowledgement for his work was (in his time) quite pervasive and consistent.
And so one spends the better part of a day languishing in front of one tortured canvas of perfection after another, but how can that be enough? Imagine if somehow you had a Van Gogh painting hanging on your wall. How much time would you spend gazing at it before you’d think, “Well, I’ve had enough of that one.”? None, right? ‘Cuz it wouldn’t happen. If you had a Van Gogh on the wall it would provide a lifetime of pleasure, and probably a few epiphanies along the way.
Now imagine a building full of them.
So yeah, I tend to stop in pretty much every time I’m in town. Hopefully I’ll go again soon.
Todd Man Out 