U can*t touch this!

Today, in the museum, I thought of MC Hammer. I was there with my kids, we were minding our business, investigating the depth and quality of Walter de Maria*s fountain, boring, this was our conclusion, not one of his better works. When a guard called from the other end of the hall, this is the huge hall in the middle of the Berliner Gemäldegalerie, an accident in architecture anyway, but that*s another story, he called from about 300 feet away that Balthazar, my son, should not, I don*t know, touch this or that feature of this near indestructible marble fountain with the sickening smell of chloride. Yes, yes, I waved the man – who came over, all the way, in a sort of Usain Boltian moment, he was next to me without my noticing, explaining me that I had, whatever. They should be happy that we are there, I thought. They do their best to turn their museum into a morgue. For pictures, not for people. Which is bad. Because the people*s morgue serves a purpose. The picture*s morgue destroys a purpose. They turn art into dead matter by behaving like the NSA.

Here we were, Balthazar and me, having a manly chat about Boticelli*s Venus – but you can only go that far with a 70-year-old woman standing practically on your toes fearing that my four-year-old son will grow in a minute twenty inches so he will be able to touch and potentially destroy the painting. Right. We then went from Boticelli to Cranach and his Jungbrunnen, Lou wanted to see all these old ladies going into the pool and exiting as young girls. She is six. She is fascinated by this. It is her Lieblingsbild.