I have been to museums before and tried to appreciate the art but always felt like I wasn’t doing it correctly or the way the artist intend for their work to be seen/felt. The biggest thing I took away from the readings was the fact that so much of art appraisal and appreciation or lack there of today is focused on the famousness of the work and not the work itself. A piece of art is not beautiful because you think it is; it is beautiful because its been used on this postcard and that magazine and was bought for that much money. This emphasis of art’s success being defined by its publicity or cost really stuck out to me.

Some of my favorite pieces in the MOMA when we went last week were ones I didn’t know and I’d never seen before. I tried to remember what I had read and think to myself as I walked through the galleries to judge whether or not I liked a piece of art based on the way I felt about it, not how I thought others felt about it. This also worked in the converse for more well known works I saw in the MOMA that were not new to me. Famous Seurat or Picasso paintings that I know well and that are considered incredibly famous based on their high number of re-printings and monetary value are ones that I took a second look at. I appraised them for myself based on my mental and emotional connection to the works. Some I found to actually appreciate more than I had in the past because I now felt my opinions of the paintings were more valid than in my prior visits. I also found that I was not as interested in some of the works I’d seen in the past because I wasn’t going to love them just because that was the social standard.

The readings gave me a deeper appreciation for my favorite painting in the MOMA: Monet’s Agapanthus. It has been my favorite of the Monet Water Lilies paintings since I was a child and first came to the MOMA. I recognize now that I loved the colors and Monet’s depiction of nature and innocence before I was old enough to know that it was an incredibly famous set of paintings. I like that I felt connected to this painting based off of how I genuinely felt about it, not a societal pressure to like it. All in all the readings helped me to better appreciate some of the pieces in the museum and gave me more confidence in my ability to critically asses the paintings that I see.