When We See Familiar Art Again We Will Have Changed

Peter Schjeldahl: Online “virtual tours” add insult to injury, in my view, as strictly spectacular, amorphous disembodiments of aesthetic experience. Inaccessible, the works conjure in the imagination a significance that we have taken for granted. Purely by existing, they stir associations and precipitate meanings that may resonate in this plague time. Why does the art of what we term the Old Masters have so much more soulful heft than that of most moderns and nearly all of our contemporaries? – The New Yorker