When I visit a museum, I often wonder if the art on the walls is truly timeless or just a product of its era's gatekeepers. My favorite painting changes every few years—last decade it was Rothko, now it's a lesser-known female surrealist I never learned about in school. Is our appreciation of art shaped more by the artist's skill or by the historical noise around it? Can we ever see a work purely on its own terms, or are we always filtering it through the lens of what critics and curators told us was important?