Can we still see? Or only take for granted?

Part of the Petit Palais' permanent collection. The delicate pastels ― sensitive to  daylight ― are downstairs.

At the Petit Palais today to see the Redon and Degas pastels exhibit, a number of museum-related questions dogged me: How long do we spend in front of each artwork? Twenty seconds? A whole minute? Two minutes with each of the 150 pastels in the basement of this 1900 exhibit hall would add up to 5 hours, not including a lunch or pee break. A show of hands of those who spent 5 hours at this exhibit. I know I did not.

Naturally, our eye selects what it likes or knows, and even the seasoned gallery goer who does not waste precious minutes peering at titles and catalogs, who has shoulders that can withstand the buffeting of pushy headset wearers and is tall enough to gain a clear vantage of his preferred images ― even such a museum visitor sturdy enough to withstand the scrum and is passing at last under the sortie sign into the sunlight can feel like opportunities were lost, can be left with a wistful feeling of what might have been. In addition, it takes more imagination than we probably possess to grasp how fresh (and even shocking) these images were to their original audiences. They have become commodified, museumified, detached from novelty or context. Well.

Most of the pastels date from 1850 to 1914.

It's a decent show. Renoir and Gauguin are represented, as well as Mary Cassatt and James Tissot. I waited about 40 minutes to get past the bag check and metal detector and into the ticket line, more than twice as long as my Louvre visits. The capital remains on a war footing and I suspect that, as in the Middle East and South Asia, the big department stores will be next to implement such measures. It is only a matter of time. Luckily, we are in a city that permits us, by parting with a couple of euros, to dispel these gloomy thoughts with a sucre-beurre crepe, one of the world's great mood elevators. That's better. So ― which museum next?