On Nov. 12 Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., a senior curator at Washington's National Gallery of Art, had cause for enormous satisfaction.
After nearly a decade's tortuous negotiations among more than a dozen of the world's most prominent museums, the Vermeer retrospective he had co-curated with the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague was finally opening, to universal acclaim.There are 35 Vermeers in the whole world: 20 of them were brought together for this exhibit.
The effect of so much stilled serenity in one place can be quite overwhelming. "Usually when a show like this opens," Wheelock told me, "people come up to you exclaiming: `Wow! Fantastic! Incredible!' Here, there's a kind of hush. People come up quietly and all they can say is `Thank you.' That's happened over and over again, and it never has before."
Two days later, however, the show closed - yet another victim of the federal shutdown occasioned by the budget impasse on Capitol Hill. It remained closed that whole week, through its first weekend. And though it finally reopened the following Monday, it closed all over again last Saturday - for the same ludicrous reason - and has remained so.
Regardless of what happens with the budget, the show will have to close permanently on Feb. 11, since it must then move to its only other site, the Mauritshuis.
It had originally been scheduled for a mere 100 days in the United States, and 13 of those have already been squandered. This will be the third shuttered weekend.
People converging from all over the world on long-scheduled and deeply anticipated trips have seen their pilgrimages dashed. Even Wheelock can't get in to see the darkened exhibition.
That this Vermeer exhibit was unprecedented goes without saying. It is the 17th-century Dutch master's first retrospective. Probably, nothing like it will ever happen again, certainly not in our lifetimes. Vermeers are too rare, the organizational complexities too daunting.
The government shutdown has spawned dire hardships and other exasperating inconveniences. But few lapses will prove as unredeemable as this.
W.H. Auden famously wrote that "art makes nothing happen." Vermeer's art makes nothing happen over and over again - the kind of stilled, breath-inheld, grace-infused and infusing "nothing" which is at the root of everything that matters.
William Carlos Williams, for his part, noted how "It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there."
At root, the government seems confused over what constitutes an "essential service"; supposedly essential services have been running throughout this crisis. These days the CIA hardly seems all that essential. Vermeer, on the other hand, is essential.
So essential, so close to the root of first things - decency, equanimity, free agency, fellow feeling, basic human regard - that perhaps the thing to do is to march the president, the Senate majority leader, the speaker of the House and the entire freshman class in Congress over to the National Gallery and to lock them inside the Vermeer show and keep them there, under its influence, until they emerge with an agreement.
Alternatively, any final agreement should specifically bar anyone who had anything to do with the shutdown fiasco from entering the Vermeer show for the duration of what are rapidly, inexorably, becoming its final weeks.