The only history you can really know is your own. The only art I’m truly an expert on is art I’ve experienced firsthand. As a critic, I’m partly a research analyst, comparing and evaluating new data. But I’m also a curator of my memory, which carries traces of art encounters from over the years. A few of those encounters — with certain objects, books, buildings — have altered the atmosphere, changed how I see and joined a permanent collection that I regularly revisit.  How would I describe that collection? Eclectic, for sure. What would an exhibition of it look like? Haphazard, perhaps. What would I need, as curator, to produce such a show in real time? Unlimited space, a carte-blanche budget and expert support: art handlers, historians, translators, conservators, architectural engineers and heavy-equipment operators, with permission-granting government and religious authorities, a cadre of crisis managers and the F.B.I. on call.  The show would have no theme except my biography, chronologically by the decade, beginning with books of lectures by John L. Stoddard that I encountered as a kid in the 1950s. Stoddard was a 19th-century career traveler who supported himself by giving public talks about his jaunts to Europe, Asia and the Middle East. In 1897 he published the lectures in 10 volumes illustrated with photographs. My grandfather had the complete set, and I pored over exotic images of samurai and yogis, Buddhist shrines, Mughal tombs and Hindu temples shaped like spacecraft. Stoddard reads like Mr. Orientalism today. But he made me a cultural traveler, and I still have the volumes, now falling apart, that I looked at most: on China, Japan and India.  The show’s first piece, however, would be a painting, Vermeer’s “The Concert,” though its inclusion would mean negotiating a tricky loan. The picture was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 and has not been recovered. Art can give us a standard of perfection against which to measure the world, and Vermeer’s picture, with its trio of musicians rehearsing in a room bathed in wintry light, was the first art to do that for me. The F.B.I. is still on the theft case. So I’d get a list of the suspects and write a letter to each, respectfully asking to borrow the painting briefly and guaranteeing its return.  I was a literature major in college in the 1960s, but as a freshman, I had a science requirement to fulfill. After scouring the listings, I discovered a single doable option: an anthropology course called Primitive Art, which met in an ethnology museum with a fabulous collection of African masks. The instant I saw them, I was hooked, and the more I learned about their origins, the more alive they seemed. Aliveness was the key. This was the first time I was aware of art that meant to do something: heal you, instruct you, scold you, make you laugh, make you shriek. The museum eventually put those masks in storage. For my show, I’d bring them back out.  By 1968, I was in Europe with a backpack and a Eurail pass, hitting museums and churches in 12 countries. Through the hostel grapevine, I heard that Turkish Airlines was offering a 60 percent student discount on flights to Istanbul. A few days later, I was standing, transfixed, under the anti-gravitational dome of Hagia Sophia. Inside that sixth-century Byzantine basilica, turned 15th-century mosque, turned 20th-century museum, I felt I was barely in Europe, and I suddenly emotionally understood the spiritual power of built space. How to convey that sensation in an exhibition? Architecture is, after all, the most you-have-to-be-there art form of all. I’d swing a deal with the Turkish government and borrow the Hagia Sophia interior.  In the 1970s, I came to New York, settled a few blocks below the World Trade Center and started writing about contemporary art. The city was a mess, but Lower Manhattan was calm and empty. Battery Park City was a vast open meadow by the Hudson, where, beginning in 1978, under the auspices of Creative Time, artists created temporary outdoor sculptures.  I remember one called “New York Ripple,” by Patsy Norvell, who died last year. Materially, it was barely anything: a strip of cheap fencing that unfurled like a paint stroke beneath the twin towers. Yet its meaning for me now, with the art world a money machine, is complex and urgent: frailty set against might, impermanence as power. The piece is long gone. But I want it in the show, even if it takes a time machine to retrieve it.  The 1980s were travel-intensive. My Byzantine interest took me to the Eastern Orthodox monastic community of Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain, on a peninsula in northern Greece, where outside visitors — men only, mostly religious pilgrims — were granted the equivalent of a four-day visa. You slept and ate at some of the 20 monasteries, never the same one twice, and hiked from one to another. Each had a church filled with centuries-old painted icons, which the monks sang to and kissed and coddled as if they were living things, which, if you believe, they are. Look into the eyes of the Athos icons in my show, and they will, no question, return your gaze.  Back in New York, I went with a friend to see a show at Japan Society called “The Great Age of Japanese Buddhist Sculpture, A.D. 600-1300” and decided to go where that art had come from. Soon I was in Kyoto, then Nara, then out in the countryside, visiting temples. I spoke no Japanese; almost no one I met spoke English. It was a long, utterly silent sojourn, entirely about looking, and I saw many beyond-eloquent things. For the show, I would single out a seventh-century wood sculpture of Miroku Bosatsu, the Buddha of the Future, preserved at the Chuguji convent in Nara. With his tea-colored skin, closed eyes and unassailable smile, he is silence embodied.  India, where Buddhism began, had to be the next stop. The vivacity of the place is overwhelming, exhilarating, addictive. And it surges through early Buddhist sculpture. The Indian Museum in Kolkata has a monumental example: a tall sandstone railing dated around 100 B.C. that once encircled a stupa at Bharhut in central India.  This is a different kind of art from the figure in Nara. It’s an art of appetites and dramas. Nature spirits carved on the railing pillars are all Kardashian curves. The story of the Buddha’s life is cut in relief, its crossbars as raucous as a telenovela. They’re part of an old, Edenic world where art, life and faith met, spring-fresh, and everything and everyone was welcomed into the picture. For the show, I could ask the Indian Museum for the loan of a pillar or two, each a stand-alone sensation. But, no. I’ll take the whole railing, thank you, keep its great circle intact.  By the 1990s, circles were shattering in New York City, as AIDS claimed friends and lovers we had hoped to grow old with. Many were artists, and entire careers vanished when people died, and apartments were emptied onto the street. Some of this art is in my memory museum; a lot of it just never just got there. I’d hire a global network of researchers, young and old, to track down AIDS-orphaned art. I’d fill galleries with the results of their searches and add more space as more findings arrived. No limits. Whatever it takes to ensure that history lives.  At this point, nearing the present, my dream show would start to wind down. What conclusions, if any, might be drawn from it? That art is as much about ideas as it is about things, about emotions as much as about materials. That it’s about politics, always, but also about devotion. That past and present in art are indivisible and equally alive. That art is alive to the degree we make it so, take it personally, think with it, live with it, become invested in our memory museums.  In 2011 I went to Africa. I saw the masks that had knocked me out in college being danced. I found icons as powerful as those at Athos. And I experienced another architecture-and-light epiphany: This one was at the Great Mosque at Djenne in Mali. During a day and part of a night, I watched this astonishing adobe building change before my eyes, turning from rose pink at dawn, to earth umber at noon, to blue-black under stars in moonlight. Those dynamic images are my permanent holdings. With the kind permission of Djenne’s citizens and the cooperation of a dream team of engineers, I would fly in the mosque itself for my show of a lifetime, moonlight, stars and all.  Critics for The Times play the role of curator.
From a Byzantine basilica to a Vermeer, an art critic imagines uniting soul-altering artworks from his travels in a single show.