What is a museum guard to do, I thought to myself; what, really, is a museum guard?
-- Adam (chapter 1)

Importance: These are Adam’s narrated inner thoughts when he observes a man who is “having a profound experience of art” (9) in the first chapter. The man initially takes up Adam’s preferred position in front of Roger Van der Weyden’s painting, Descent from the Cross. Then the man moves to consider Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. The man is overcome with emotion such that his behavior alerts the museum guards whose remit is to protect the paintings in the museum from the public. The irony is that the man is perhaps displaying the precisely ideal response to great works of art; he is validating the entire premise of the museum as an institution. Adam’s question tugs at this tension between the ideal and actual. In it he questions...