Saturday, February 13, 2016

What it looks like to take the notion of the "public trust" too seriously

In a review of works from the collection of Paul Allen at the Phillips, Pulitzer Prize winning critic Philip Kennicott tells us:

"But the problem with collecting masterworks of great artists is that the act of ownership is in itself a kind of theft, stealing from the public commons of genius. Put another way, once a work of art is important enough to be of interest to a man like Allen, it belongs to all of us. He may not know that, but we do."