Eye-to-eye …

… Bryan Appleyard — Blog Archive — Simon Schama: The Intellectual IED. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

“My whole life has been devoted to the notion that portraits presuppose a sort of engagement. They are the least self-contained form of art. You always have a sitter, and you’ve always got to think of where it’s going to hang. There’s a messy engagement between what hangs on the gallery wall and the rest of the world buzzing around it that has always interested me.”