Kosinski's Goal: 'To Make People Share . . . My Joy'

Dorothy Kosinski, who starts as the Phillips Collection's new director this spring, describes a life with art as a continuing exchange that can profoundly shape not only how you see but "what's important and not important to you." It is, she says, "an exalted conversation, compared to 'Do you want paper or plastic?' " Here are some of her ideas about the nature of that conversation, and how it might be conducted under her leadership at the Phillips. They are distilled from a two-hour discussion with Post art critic Blake Gopnik.

Describe one of your most glorious early moments in a museum.

At Yale, one of my major papers was on Leonardo's "Virgin of the Rocks." And finally, after writing the paper, there I am in Paris, finally seeing it.

I was thrilled.

I felt fulfilled, I was there for hours. I couldn't be moved. And then what struck me so strongly was that no one else was looking at that painting. They were all in a crowd, half a gallery down, in front of the well-protected Mona Lisa.

The fact that no one was looking at this glorious painting that I could not pull myself away from was just such a curious feeling. It's like reading someone's letters, and then meeting the person. The painting was just so unearthly beautiful. I was so perplexed that no one else seemed to see that. So that's a challenge for a museum professional -- to make people share my fixation and my joy.

I did enjoy the quiet and slightly run-down quality of the Louvre at that point. There were not many lines, and there was no centralized, modernized I.M. Pei pyramid to funnel the huge crowds there are now into the museum.

Sometimes expansions can be unfortunate. Sometimes they can steal away the character of a place. Big is not always better. Sometimes the scale of galleries can be extraordinarily impersonal and off-putting -- so that no matter the work of art, it struggles to find its voice. Sometimes that can be a little sad. Scale is a big issue. Scale and tone. Architecture is deeply important in how I live, and how I think about museums. There's my husband's work, and I grew up with architecture because my oldest brother is an architect.

One of the aspects of being a curator that still fills my heart with joy is the installation, the design. As an art historian, in a museum context, that's probably your most powerful interpretive tool.

Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has said that museums everywhere are suffering from special-exhibition fever. The public is beckoned from one show to another at the expense of quiet moments in the permanent collection. Can that fever be brought down ?

The fever started at the Met, under his predecessor, Mr. Hoving!

The public demands things that are new -- there is a hunger for that. And also there are financial realities. That's just there. I think that the key to special exhibitions -- and there is a need for special exhibitions -- is that they should be derived from or respond to permanent collections in a very deliberate way. That those are the inspiration for complex ideas that then demand to be seen in the flesh, in a special exhibition. It's so difficult: It's costly, it's inherently dangerous to works of art, it's arduous; it takes man- and woman-hours of labor to do a temporary exhibition. One only wants to undertake that project when it will bring new knowledge, new insights to us and to the public.