4 ms·

Truly my favorite museum in America.

• stochastic_monk 8y ago
  It’s the best art museum outside of Paris I’ve been to.
• fermienrico 8y ago
  How does it compare with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York?
  • tptacek 8y ago
    It's a great museum, among the best museums (full stop) in the country, but it's less than 1/4 of the size of the Met.
    • forapurpose 8y ago
      True, but after a certain point size doesn't matter for the visitor. I can see only a small fraction of the Met in any visit; IIRC a prior director said he couldn't see the entire collection, including the majority which is not on display at any one time, in his lifetime. If the Met grows, it doesn't change the size from my perspective. If you are interested in specific individual collections then size might matter; if you are interested in Polynesian art, then possibly you could exhaust the Met's or Chicago's collections (I don't know). But in some respects the two museums are the same size. And to go off on a tangent, I now find that I gain much more by spending a long time, maybe 30 minutes each, with a few works of art, rather than spending a few minutes each with 100 works. So for me, a museum with 10 great (IMHO) works would be plenty big, and better than a museum with 100,000 works that I have to sort through or walk past to find the ones I'm interested in. (Though the odds that the 10-piece museum would have what I want are a bit longer.)
      • kasey_junk 8y ago
        For the record both the Met & the Art Institute have enough great pieces to last your whole life if you are into contemplation. For that matter I spent an hour with the Art Institutes paper weight collection one time and felt I learned something.