This book is about how we experience art, how we look at it, how we think about it. It is structured in the form of a series of conversations in some of the best-known museums in the world, but also outside the museums, where we often look upon art in a completely different way. The two protagonists are Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for 31 years to 2008, and the art critic Martin Gayford. In the process, both men convey, with subtlety and brilliance, the delights and significance of their subject matter.