Every time I visit a museum, I feel those eyes boring into the nape of my neck. My greatest flaw is that I get too close to paintings. It’s as if being a student and lover of the fine arts, observing images and desiring only to contemplate and comprehend, has gone out of style. One is assumed guilty of wanting to destroy the paintings, because we are all just part of a herd, a statistic. And because “custom becomes law” when there is no legislator aside from the masses (which now take the form of an algorithm), nobody argues.

Excessive tourism is a cultural accident that has legitimized itself, that has become perpetual and global. It seems the original sin is having permitted objects to be classified according to whether they contain written texts or are simply made up of shapes and colors. Do images, simply by virtue of being mute, really have nothing to say?

Luckily, many paintings that deserve long, silent contemplation cannot be found in tourist guides and are safe in museums, in galleries that no one visits.