[It’s a] privilege to witness such a wide variety of minds going at it, appreciating, remembering, confronting, excoriating an entire universe of art, from the canvases of Degas and Watteau to the Akkadian-carved basalt stele of Hammurabi.
The situation seemed ripe for mining a precious metal known as “poignancy,” the urgency of the [writers’] strong desires to fulfill their ambitions and the wrenching back of that desire in the form of rejection.