Then there was the guard at MOMA where I worked as a student when I was attending NYU. Before becoming secretary to Monroe Wheeler, my job was basically simple – working in the ticket booth or selling books. That didn’t stop me from looking at the paintings whenever I could, or looking down from the rooftop terrace and marvelling how the snow transformed the statues in the sculpture garden. How interesting it must be, I would think, to be able to have at your beck and call all those marvellous works. One day I asked the guard on the floor above, who stood near a mostly red painting, all of six feet high, all day long, although I don’t now remember the artist but I believe he was South American or Russian, before reaching the room with Monet’s water lilies, what it was like to be surrounded by all those paintings every day.
Guard at MOMA
“Well”, he answered, “it’s like when you live next to the railroad tracks. After a while you don’t hear the trains go by any more.”
He must, though, have been thinking of something but I never thought to ask him what.
Familiarity. Taking things for granted.
Things. People. Our surroundings. How difficult to continue to be aware of what is right and wrong, of what others give you, of the beauty inherent in nature.
Erika Bizzarri 
So true. When we experience the same people or things (Art) day after day it is so easy to forget how important they are to us. We can easily take for granted a spouse, a friend or an experience. As I am keenly aware of this, I do try very hard not to let it happen.
Cheers,
Tom Tiberio
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How thought-provoking!
Perhaps he was a supremely conscientious employee: spent all his time scrutinising the visitors for potential misbehaviour, hardly free to look at the art!
Or do you suppose he took in the art and found himself missing it when he had time away on vacation?!
Hmm … thought-provoking!
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Such a truth about human nature. Everyday I find something new in Orvieto. When I go back to the States this summer, I plan on looking for the new. Thanks for sharing Erika.
David Watros
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I love this…work is not natural..it is a cultural construct. We enter in playfulness and see all the paintings…Play is natural. At ‘work’ it is so easy to automate our responses and your post makes us ponder and the beauty inherent in people and nature.
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Unfortunately, there is no longer any sense of right or wrong. Science is opposed to morality, as it is seen to interfere with its necessary ‘objectivity’. Economics is the most psychopathic, as it has so many assumptions before it even begins its scientific work, that it is little more than a highly rewarded ideology. There are people in the so-called developed countries who are experimenting with small-scale living arrangements, where morality may be rediscovered. They have been labeled ‘cultural creatives’ by Ray & Anderson, in their book by that name, and there are always the now 360,000 Amish, the Mennonites and the Mormons, as well as other small groups in rural settings in the U.S., who are experimenting with more traditional small scale societies. YouTube also has discussions and presentations that deal with this question. Returning to a sense of morality will be a very slow process, especially given the need for power that motivates the oligarchs who control society. Epicurus understood this 2000 years ago, when he created his garden based upon love and friendship, not the accumulation of material goods as in our current ‘philosophy’, governed by ‘hedonism’, a totally mistranslated and distorted translation of Epicurus’ word ‘Îδονή’, which defined his understanding of the happy society. I’m attaching a copy of a chapter of a book I am working on, which discusses this question in somewhat more detail. Good Luck in all things, Jerry
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Yes, Erica. Reason enough to make work (Art) – not only as a direct act of appreciation, but as tangible evidence of that appreciation to be revisited in perpetuity.
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