A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes in galleries on the walls of auction houses and off the walls in museum storage.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

Outside museums in noisy public squares people look at people. Inside museums we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind getting quiet to look at art.

I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York ' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

Many museums are drawing audiences with art that is ostensibly more entertaining than stuff that just sits and invites contemplation. Interactivity gizmos eating hanging out things that make noise - all are now the norm often edging out much else.

The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States it is arguably the finest anywhere.

The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing museums are scaling back.

Summer is a great time to visit art museums which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools - only instead of cool water you immerse yourself in art.

It is veneer rouge aestheticism art museums new theaters etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football kindness and jazz bands.

Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.

Until the Eighties Oslo was a rather boring town but it's changed a lot and is now much more cosmopolitan. If I go downtown I visit the harbour to see the tall ships and the ferries and to admire the modern architecture such as the Opera House or the new Astrup Fearnley Museum on the water's edge.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

But we cannot rely on memorials and museums alone. We can tell ourselves we will never forget and we likely won't. But we need to make sure that we teach history to those who never had the opportunity to remember in the first place.