Spring has truly arrived here in Washington, DC, and so has Pope Benedict XVI, although he has now gone to New York. He celebrated a huge Mass at the Washington Nationals stadium here, and I am very proud of our friend Ronald Stolk whose stock went up overnight as he played the organ. Although for my sensibilities these occasions gather too many unmarried white male seniors, I do admit that I remain riveted by the pageantry and was much moved by Placido Domingo’s passionate rendition of Bach’s Panis Angelicus[*] and not less so when afterwards the Pope rose from his seat and Domingo rushed towards him, falling to his knees before him and kissing his ring. A truly operatic moment. And the commiseration with the abuse victims was a great step forward. As you can see from the photo, I was glad to be able to have my own little private moment with the Holy Father. Raising your eyebrows? That’s my Dutch irreverence for you (and when you grow up a Catholic, you can poke fun at it).

I am hopelessly behind with this blog, I’m very slow and do too many other things and not enough painting and blogging. I have a long list of subjects I want to cover: the two small exhibits I saw in Atlanta at the High Museum (I covered the folk art there in a previous blog); the stunning Louise Bourgeois (still active at 97) retrospective in Paris at the Centre Pompidou; the contents of the Musée Quai Branly (dedicated by Jacques Chirac to “the primary arts”), also in Paris; the beautiful small El Anatsui exhibit here in DC in the National Museum of African Art, as well as the truly, truly sumptuous exhibit at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery entitled “Patterned Feathers, Piercing Eyes: Edo Masters From the Price Collection”. Wherever I go, I never change my mind that DC is a vast and mostly free treasure trove for the arts. Then New York: the magical Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim, Courbet at the Met and the wildly annoying and truly crappy Whitney Biennal. Ron still mutters bitterly about the $15 tickets. Then there is my recent affiliation with CentroNía, a bilingual (Spanish/English) Community Development and Educational Center with a Charter School here in DC, where art is integrated in the children’s learning experience - and beats anything I saw at the Whitney. And there is my friend Joan Danziger's new show at Osuna Art in Bethesda. Also, there are two amazing books out that I’d like to describe soon, both edited by Umberto Eco: “The History of Ugly” and “The History of Beauty” (I bought the “ugly” book in Paris, in French, for almost 40 Euros (now $60) but I can reassure you that they exist in English and can be found at Amazon for less than $25 each). And finally, I am going next week to see the Frida Kahlo exhibition in Philadelphia.

Someone, a very dear cousin, asked me why I blog. I got the impression she saw it as something daring, like bungee jumping (and probably a bit crazy and exhibitionist, which it of course is). So here’s the answer: because I can. When I decided to create an artistic web-presence at www.zhibit.org, I saw their individual sites came with a blog opportunity included – I love to write, I had been thinking about blogging for a while because it’s helpful if there is an audience, even if it consists of one (you). I hope for reactions – I like reactions, I like to share things, discuss things. And I loved it when one of my neighbors popped out of his house recently when I walked the dog and waved at me, calling out, “Good morning! I loved your blog!”  It is the magic of the internet, which allows you to be an author without ever needing to be published. Most of all, though, especially when I describe an exhibition in the blog, I feel I need to know more than when I just randomly wander around a museum for my own pleasure, so I have taken to writing furiously in a notebook as well as to researching the subject a bit. I quickly found out, of course, that doing so enriches my own museum experience.

So now you know.