Today's edition of the
New York Times
reports on the
Worcester
[Massachusetts] Art Museum's exhibition
Hope and Healing: Painting in
Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500-1800. The article (
Desperately
Painting the Plague by Holland Cotter) is good enough,
extending over two pages, but when both eyeballing the pages for a
link and searching the source code for 'worcesterart', you see that
there is no link to the museum's site or to that site's pages on
the exhibition.
It's not difficult either to insert the links or to find; googling
"Worcester Art Museum" (even
without the quotes) has the
institution's main page as the first item returned.
On the other hand, the bottom of the article's pages has a link to
'Worcester Art Museum', but no, that doesn't provide a link to the
museum. It displays pages where the
Times referred to the
Museum. Talk about insularity.
In addition, the
Times's narrow, provincial point of view
shows in this quote about how Americans view religious themes in
art:
Although Americans have relatively little
trouble seeing African or Indian sculpture - art that isn't really
"us" - in this light ['through the eyes of a believer for whom a
picture of the Virgin is a moral lesson and an emotional encounter
before it is a Tiepolo or a Tintoretto], Judeo-Christian religious
art is another story. It's as if we are afraid of what it once was,
or embarrassed by it, or simply unaware of its very specific power
to answer, in the case of the paintings gathered here, a culture's
cry of pain.
If we substitute 'this
New York Times art critic' for
'Americans' in the first sentence and 'I am' for 'we are' in the
second, the comments may be more accurate.
The
Times's stock of clues ran out a long time ago. Does
Holland Cotter really think 'Americans [have trouble seeing art]
... through the eyes of a believer'?