Museums & Art

I had seen this painting perhaps four hundred times before I ever saw it. On fridge magnets, on tea towels, on postcards in every souvenir shop between Centraal and the Bloemenmarkt in …

I studied history. That is most of the explanation for this blog, and it is the whole explanation for why I will happily give an hour to one room in the Rijksmuseum …

People call the Rijksmuseum the Louvre of Amsterdam, and I understand why. Both are national collections in enormous nineteenth-century buildings, both are built around one painting everybody has come to see, and …

Amsterdam on 27 April is orange. King’s Day empties the offices and fills the canals, and by mid-afternoon most of the city is on a boat, on a bicycle, or sitting on …

Here is what I knew about Jean-Michel Basquiat before I walked into that room: he went out with Madonna. That was it. That was the whole of it. A man with work …

I walked into this exhibition knowing nothing. I could not have said what Johan Cruyff played, when, or for whom. I knew the name the way a person knows a name: something …

Almost everyone walks straight past the outside of the Moco Museum in Amsterdam. Ticket in hand, timed slot ticking, up the steps and into the villa, because that is where the Banksys …

I went to Moco Museum in Amsterdam for the Banksys. That was the whole plan. The stencils, the rats, the girl with the balloon, and then out through the shop and home. …

There is a line painted on the wall at Moco in Amsterdam, in dripping letters imitating Banksy’s stencil style, that says if graffiti changed anything it would be illegal. He did not …

The question I kept asking myself on the way out was why I had waited so long. I have been to Barcelona. I have been to London. Moco has a museum in …

Migration is not only a Greek story, or an Italian one. It belongs to everyone, everywhere, and it always has: the leaving, the packing of a whole life into one suitcase, and …

Travel is not only palaces and pastries. Part of why I travel is to understand places, and understanding a place means meeting its history, including the parts that are hard to look …