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# Weekend Words: Woo
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-woo/
- Published: 2014-03-23T12:20:15.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:33:43.000Z
- Description: On Thursday, the New York Times published a large pull-out section, Museums, which included an article on the attempts various institutions have made at "Wooing a New Generation of Museum Patrons."
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:03 (2014, 2015, part 1)

![woo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/woo.jpg)

Willem Pietersz Buytewech, “Dignified Couples Courting” (c. 1618), oil on canvas, 56 x 70 cm (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) (image via Web Gallery of Art)

On Thursday, the *New York Times* published a large pull-out section, *Museums*, which included an article on the attempts various institutions have made at “[Wooing a New Generation of Museum Patrons](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/arts/artsspecial/wooing-a-new-generation-of-museum-patrons.html?hp&ref=hyperallergic.com).”

Will they succeed? In the words of money market man Charles Schwab, “If not, museums will degenerate and will eventually fall into the hands of government budgets and be in a death spiral. I hope that’s not the case.”

> “Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty; for in my youth I never did apply hot and rebellious liquors in my blood; and did not, with unbashful forehead, woo the means of weakness and debility: therefore my age is as a lusty winter, frosty but kindly.”  
>  
> **—William Shakespeare, *As You Like It***

> “Healing, Papa would tell me, is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.”  
>  
> **—W. H. Auden**

> “Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.”  
>  
> **—Ralph Waldo Emerson**

> “Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, and cries reproachful: Was it then my praise, and not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth; I claim of thee the promise of thy youth.”  
>  
> **—James Russell Lowell**

> “Wooing, so tiring.”  
>  
> **—Nancy Mitford, *The Pursuit of Love***

> “Wooing the press is an exercise roughly akin to picnicking with a tiger. You might enjoy the meal, but the tiger always eats last.”  
>  
> **—Maureen Dowd**