(Other than Garfunkel and Bell)

Tonight, I visited the pre-opening of the new Art of the Americas wing at the Museum of Fine Arts. (I got an invitation because I participated in a focus group for some of the interactive displays last year.) The new wing is more of a new cube — four floors of glass and steel, arranged chronologically from top to bottom, so you can climb from pre-Columbian lobster vases to Calder and Rothko. There's a lot of American art I can do without — the unending river of 18th-century portraiture, for instance — but the galleries are put together to maximize variety. If you don't like the portraits, you might like the marble sarcophagus in the center of the room, or the stained glass, or the wall of weathervanes. There was a lot of texture in each gallery, conceptually, with educational or surprising juxtapositions. And there's a lot to see — I needed much more than the hour and a half I had.

Since most of the punters were over in the new wing, I had the medieval and European galleries almost entirely to myself when I ducked in. It's a very different experience, sitting among Renoirs and van Goghs and Monets at nine o'clock at night, unable even to hear another soul. All in smiling silence, I peered at tiny Saint Sebastians and Mary Magdalenes, enameled pyxes, a spoon depicting the Wolf-Headed Man Reading to Geese.