Brady Bowman logo Brady Bowman

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.

Alan Jacobs, arguing that intractable cultural debates are often downstream from philological confusion (in this case, the transition from “sex” to “gender”):

When “sex” became the most common term for coitus, we found ourselves needing a different term to describe the distinction between male and female. And when in turn “gender” emerged as that term, it was inevitably accompanied by the arbitrary character that it possesses in its grammatical context. Moreover, that emergence occurred in a social world that had come (for reasons too complex to be traced here) to perceive the human individual as the locus of meaning and value—as a rational actor choosing its own meanings, its own values. The sense of arbitrariness embedded in the term “gender” is a perfect fit for such a society; indeed, perhaps this is why “gender” emerged as the preferred substitute for “sex” to describe what male and female are.

Therefore, to talk about our current debates as debates about “gender” is already to concede the most essential point at issue: whether maleness and femaleness are rooted in biological reality or are basically linguistic, arbitrary signifiers. The first step in making these debates more productive is to call attention to the philological facts: the ways that our language for discussing these matters has changed, giving a certain structure to our debates.