They look like molecules that have drifted out of a school

They look like molecules that have drifted out of a school chemistry textbook. The bubbles are overlaid with captions, many of which are dated and timed. When the dates and times are the same on both paintings, the captions are always different: “5th July 11.23am, rattling a stick across railings”; “5th July 11.23am, the click whirr of a hard drive”. What does all this amount to? It means Tyson is reminding us that we all inhabit parallel worlds of consciousness.

We live beside each other, but separately, thinking different thoughts.The pair of paintings represent the embodiment of a clever wheeze which, when reduced to a description such as this, strikes one as banal.Tyson is guilty of this a lot. He has a big brain and lots of loudly voiced ideas about the “global totality of knowledge and language” but, taken together, the work seems emotionally thin, more the tricksy, adroit antics of some brainbox than art of any memorable substance.Michael Glover. One of the most popular museums in the world has a room stuffed with great paintings that visitors seldom see. It is a secret gallery, except for those who have stumbled upon the secret. The small room is poorly signposted, and hidden in an awkward corner of the Mus?d’Orsay in Paris.

It contains 20 Impressionist, post-Impressionist and Fauvist paintings by artists ranging from Van Gogh to Monet, from C?nne to Seurat, from Pissarro to Derain. Paris has a surfeit of publicly owned art (vast sections of the Louvre and Beaubourg collections are never shown). The Mus?d’Orsay has the world’s most extraordinary collection of Impressionist paintings on its celebrated and permanently besieged top floor.Our room – we have come to think of it as our room – is on the floor below It goes unnoticed and unloved. The hidden gallery was discovered accidentally by my wife a few months ago. She wandered down the back stairs at the museum, along a narrow corridor, around two corners, and found herself all alone with a Monet, two Bonnards, two C?nnes, two Renoirs, a Gauguin, two Vlamincks, a Seurat, a Van Gogh, etc, etc.I spent over an hour in there with two of my children the other day.

(What else can you do in Paris with children on a rainy day?) In that time, only four other people came into the room. The expression on their faces said either, “Oh, no, not more Impressionists”, or, “This isn’t the loo”, and they walked out again.Clare, aged eight, likes to “copy” paintings with felt tip-pens A Van Gogh took her two minutes; a Monet a little longer. (“They did it better,” she admitted.) Grace, aged five, lay flat on the floor for 30 minutes, with her colour pens spread around her, doing a freelance version of a beautiful Renoir painting of a vase of gladioli The custodian did not bother either of them. Why should he? They weren’t in anyone’s way.The room is on the middle floor of the building, in the south-west corner; follow the confusing signs, if you can It is called the “Collection Max et Rosy Kaganovitch”. Officials at the Mus?d’Orsay admit that the collection is obscurely placed, easy to miss, and poorly displayed.