Repositories Of Wonderment Poem by gershon hepner

Repositories of wonderment, your breasts
are touchstones of the beauty that like silk
appeal to eyes and my right hand that rests
upon them, squeezing love instead of milk.

Michael Kimmelman, in an article on Thomas Hoving (“A populist Museum Chief With a Sense of Wonder, ” NYT, Dec 12,2009) writes about Thomas Hoving:
A friend who has worked at the Metropolitan Museum for years shot me an e-mail message on Thursday, after Tom Hoving died. He lamented how Mr. Hoving, from the bully pulpit of his directorship in the ’60s and ’70s, changed art museums from places where people went to commune with art into places “where art ‘happens.’ ” Looking back, you might say his whole tenure was itself a decade-long “happening.” This wasn’t altogether good, it’s true. But Mr. Hoving also believed that art museums were public repositories of wonderment, and in a sense his most revolutionary idea was that everybody should be able to see what he thought was great art, as he saw it.I don’t mean simply that people should all have equal access to great pictures. I mean he wanted people to feel that same outsize thrill he felt standing in front of a picture, that same connoisseur’s rush that comes from knowing that something is terrific. However hucksterish and unrealistic, this wasn’t just about moving bodies through turnstiles. It was about somehow democratizing knowledge and feeling, which remains the big difference between him and so many of the bean-counting bureaucrats who have turned our art museums into malls.

12/12/09