If you can visit the National Gallery in London personally, more power to you. For those of us who can’t, though, National Gallery is the next best thing. As is par for the course in a Frederick Wiseman doc, we learn a lot about the subject matter, and we do it by smosis; not in scripted interviews, but like any other museum visitor; i.e., listening to the guides, whom Wiseman allows to go on at length to better recreate the real experience. Additionally, as he is also wont to do, Wiseman peeks behind the scenes at the internal mechanism of the institution; in this case, the backstage look is not limited to the administrative inner workings, but also includes invaluable visits to the workshops where anonymous artists carry out the very important task of retouching, restoring, and preserving. Specifically, the National Gallery is an art gallery — that is, a space destined exclusively for the exhibition of artistic works of a pictorial nature —, but this institution emphasizes the integration of the arts, and accordingly the museum halls welcome such artistic expressions as a piano recital or a ballet.

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