Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums: Stories and Memorable Moments from People Who Love Museums

Cartoonist Eckstein (Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores) explains that the 72 institutions included in his affectionate tour of North American museums are not intended as a definitive ranking (“Otherwise I would have taken into account the three things travelers are most interested in: the museum cafe, the gift shop, and the bathrooms”). Instead, the idiosyncrasy of his “most fascinating” criteria produces a charming juxtaposition of lauded (the Met; the Smithsonian) and obscure institutions (Boston’s Museum of Bad Art, which displays paintings plucked from the trash). While Eckstein’s ample facts occasionally strain for significance (the Whitney contains “New York City’s largest column-free exhibition spaces”), the book’s true strengths are its role as a kind of communal scrapbook, with piquant anecdotes relayed from others—like poet Sharon Messmer, who, recalling a break-up with a boyfriend at the Art Institute of Chicago, blames the museum’s proximity to bars—and Eckstein’s illustrations. Many of those, including a depiction of a gargantuan James Turrell light installation at Mass MoCA with minuscule humans crowded before it, communicate a sense of being dwarfed and stunned, suggesting such feelings stem from both great art and great museums’ showcasing of it. The result is a touching rumination on public art’s potential to provoke personal epiphany. (May)