I suppose that a good point from which to start is to ask whether the effort expended is proportionate to the result achieved. When I was a graduate student in Canada there was an often repeated joke which went as follows. “What is the definition of a sociologist?” The answer was, “Somebody who needs to spend $10,000 to find a whore-house.” I’ve just returned from a visit to Rome and I have to confess that I have been asking questions about the utility of the exercise.
The thing I most wanted to do there was to visit the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, to see a particular picture by Renato Guttuso, which is to be the focus of a lecture I am due to give next month. I got to the museum to discover that it is on loan to a major gallery in the USA! Was my energy wasted? I think not, for the following reasons.
First of all, the fact of its being the subject of a loan to a globally known institution validates my perception that it is a piece of great significance. Then, I did have the opportunity to look at some other works by Guttuso in the Gallery, and the chance to see that my understanding of the way in which he worked is correct. Also, looking around the Gallery as a whole, my judgement of the exceptional significance of Guttuso as a representative of Italian modernism is absolutely on target. Finally, an incidental benefit of the visit was that I was reminded of the interest of the work of another artist, Alberto Burri, to whom I might well turn my attention later.
So: the conclusion to which I am drawn, despite my initial disappointment, is that my time has certainly not been wasted. There were, of course, other features of the trip, but these might well crop up in subsequent entries to this blog.