James K. A. Smith, with sage advice on how to visit a museum:

When visiting a museum or gallery, I think studiousness can be a vice. Too much diligence—earnestly following the sequence laid out by the curators, studying each label, expecting every work to be significant—can protect us from actual aesthetic exposure. Sometimes playing the connoisseur, with its haughty dismissal of sentimentalism, insulates us from being moved, changed, perhaps even called by a work of art. And so, perhaps heretically, I’m an advocate of roaming, of unburdened wandering the gallery, as a practice of attentive availability. My pilgrimage through a museum is a contemplative glide. Alert but promiscuous in my looking, I refuse to be held down until I encounter a work that holds my gaze. I’m waiting for that strange experience when a picture speaks, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes with a shout, sometimes with a reverberating silence that pulls me to the edge of a precipice where I’m not sure whether I’ll fall or fly. […]

The possibility of being surprised, hooked, so to speak, requires the cultivation of a certain kind of availability. There’s an irony to this: I need to make choices that make it possible, once in a while, for my will and intellect to be bowled over, overwhelmed by an arrival that grabs hold of me. In other words, once I’ve purposely journeyed into unknown territory, sometimes I need to put down the guidebook and simply drift. There might be long seasons of incubation that feel like walking through the same gallery over and over again, unaffected. But that is the discipline of aesthetic availability: training for surprise.