A local museum in Salem had a Joseph Cornell exhibit a few years back. http://www.pem.org/sites/cornell/ http://www.pem.org/sites/cornell/ I really liked his

A local museum in Salem had a Joseph Cornell exhibit a few years back. http://www.pem.org/sites/cornell/ http://www.pem.org/sites/cornell/ I really liked his work. My taste in art ranges all over the place. I like a fair amount of modern stuff. I like a fair bit of expressionist and surrealist art, although some of it gets a bit too silly. I also tend to like 17th century Dutch and Flemish art (Reubens, Hals, Rembrant, and of course Vermeer). Which is not to say I can't spend hours staring at impressionist paintings, or medieval art, or Caravaggios, or over-the-top Neoclassical blockbusters from Jacques-Louis David. (From what I can see, the typical David is like a Cecil B. Demille film condensed into one enormous frame.) My favorite art moment so far was in a specific room in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where I was able to spend pretty much an entire hour at a time when the museum was really quiet. I would stare at Vermeer's View of Delft until I got tired of it, then turn around to stare at Girl With A Pearl Earring, which despite having been turned into the basis of some kind of slick international blockbuster is still an awesome painting. View of Delft is an astonishing work. I found it difficult to believe how great it was. You can't really tell from the postcard-sized reproductions. It was on that trip that I began to understand that paint is a very, very special substance in the hands of a master.